By Emilio Paladino and Aline Abdu, ESSS

Cassiano A. Cezrio, Marcelo Verardi and Samuel S. Borges, WEG Electric Motors, R&D Department
ANSYS CFX enabled engineers to understand air velocity
profiles and improve the heat transfer coefficient.
Improving Electric Motor
Cooling System Efficiency
WEG Electric Motor Corporation is the largest Latin
American electric motor manufacturer and is present
on five continents in more than 60 countries. The
company develops a large part of its own technology
and has been using CFD to improve products
performance. One particular interest is the cooling
systems of electric motors. The cooling system is
responsible for keeping the temperature of the internal
components within a specific range to maintain or
increase the life of the motor.
Several experimental tests have already
been developed to address this issue, but WEG
engineers required a tool that would supply a better
understanding of the flow pattern of the cooling
system for quick testing of virtual prototypes. As an
initial step, a CFD model of the cooling system
was developed and its results compared to the
experimental data available. This model involved a fan
and an extremely complex shell (motor frame),
including fins to improve the heat exchange.
Qualitative comparison with smoke experiments
23
www.ansys.com ANSYS Solutions | Fall 2005
Images courtesy of
WEG Motors
Because of the complex geometry, a computa-
tional mesh was created using tetrahedral elements,
and prism layers were added at the walls to capture
the boundary layer effects. The main objective of the
analysis was to evaluate the velocity profile at the
channel between the fins. The CFD model included
the fan rotor. A far field type of boundary condition was
imposed in such a way that the air flow rate was driven
by the fan rotor. The resulting grid size was about 2.2
million nodes and demanded just 220 iterations to
converge (1e-5 RMS residual) using a high-resolution
advection scheme. The high-quality ANSYS ICEM
CFD tetra/prism mesh, together with the robustness
and accuracy of the ANSYS CFX coupled solver,
made this task easy and fast. After results were
obtained, air velocity profiles at channels between the
fins were compared against experimental measure-
ments and showed very good agreement.
CFX results permitted WEG engineers not only to
visualize the air velocity profiles in the channels, which
are related to the heat transfer coefficient and have
been previously measured experimentally, but have
also provided a complete understanding of the flow
and heat behavior. This is helping to improve the heat
transfer coefficient on this equipment, to create better
products and to reduce the design time.
Predicted vs. experimental velocity values at different
channel positions
ANSYS CFX simulation
Computational mesh
CFX simulation allowed us to see
flow pattern details that were not
perceived experimentally and helped
to explain some phenomena that were
detected with experiments but difficult
to be explained without a better
comprehension of the flow details.
Cassiano A. Cezrio, WEG R&D Department
24
CFD Update: Whats New in Computational Fluid Dynamics
www.ansys.com ANSYS Solutions | Fall 2005