Trajectory Motion: Paint Dipping of a Chassis on a Fixed Skid

Paint dipping is a process by which a component is coated with paint in a dipping tank. Simcenter STAR-CCM+ allows you to simulate this process and therefore study the effects of different trajectories and component speeds.

Usually, the paint dipping process must achieve two goals:
  1. In the dip-in phase, the entire surface must be moistened by paint without any air bubbles forming and adhering to the surface.
  2. In the dip-out phase, the paint must form a homogenous film on the component surface without paint pockets.

Designing a suitable dipping trajectory is critial for achieving these goals. In Simcenter STAR-CCM+, you can apply trajectory motion, which is a rigid motion along 3D curves.

This tutorial demonstrates the workflow for setting up a paint dipping simulation using trajectory motion and the VOF multiphase method. A chassis is moving on a fixed skid whose trajectory is described by a trajectory table. The dipping tank is 46.7m long. The chassis moves with a translational speed of 0.5m/s. The whole dipping process is designed to last around 75s.

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is applied in order to provide adequate mesh resolution around the overset interface and the VOF free surface. In the physics continuum you add the Adaptive Mesh model and apply model-driven adaptive mesh criteria for both the free surface and the overset mesh. Simcenter STAR-CCM+ allows you to run simulations with both criteria active at the same time.

The final trajectory motion with adaptive mesh refinement is displayed as follows:



In the animation you can observe automatic mesh refinement along the free surface and also where the overset region meets the background mesh.