Design module team project. Onshape, SimScale CFD.
Liquid Distribution Plate
A plate that splits water flow evenly across its surface, with no dead zones and as little of the plate taken up as possible. The final design replaced 100% of the liquid on the plate within 45 seconds; the original replaced only about 10%.
Final design against the plain plate
Mixing score in the weakest strip, plain plate
Same strip with two split elements
Mixing score runs from 0, where the two streams stay separate, to 1, where they are perfectly even. The final design reached this with no extra pressure drop, and kept the slow-flow zone to 7.5% of the plate.
The final design in 3D
Drag to rotate, scroll or pinch to zoom. All nine printed parts: the body, base plate, insert, two split elements and four inlet and outlet ports. Explode it to see how they fit together.
The brief
For our design module, my team had to make a 500 × 500 mm plate that splits a flow of water evenly across its inside. Out of several options, we chose this one. We judged each design at steady state on three things:
- No dead zones where water sits still.
- Little or no preferred channels that carry most of the flow.
- As little of the plate's inner area taken up by features as possible.
What I did
- Designed a long series of plate concepts in CAD, from early pin-and-vane layouts to the final two-element design.
- Ran SimScale CFD on each one and read the velocity fields to find dead zones and preferred channels.
- Compared designs on mixing, slow-flow area and pressure drop, and fed the results into the next iteration.
The mistake that shaped the project
I started simulating before we had the real fluid properties, so I used the wrong viscosity and density. Tuned to that fluid, my early designs grew dense fields of pins and guide vanes that did little for a low-viscosity fluid like water.
Once I had the real numbers, much simpler shapes worked better. Every design after that point got cleaner and scored higher.
How the design developed
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Coat-hanger
Won the first round of SimScale tests at 300 mm.
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Twin-inlet baseline
A plain plate with two inlets. Every later design was measured against it. Mixing score: 0.01.
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Split and recombine
A full-width split that swaps the two streams. The best overall mixing score of any design, at 0.44.
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Two split elements
Small split elements only in the weakest strip. Two beat three, and this is our final design.
What I took away
- Get the real material properties before designing around a simulation.
- For a low-viscosity fluid, simple geometry placed in the right spot beats complex features everywhere.
- Fewer, targeted elements can outperform more of them: two split elements beat three.
CAD files
STEP files for each design above, plus the print-ready STL and the full nine-part assembly of the final design. Each opens on GitHub, where you can download it; the STL can be viewed in 3D there too.
See all 19 design files on GitHub