Friday December 20, 2013 at 12:05pm
Christmas is getting close and the pressure to produce the turkey and stuffing whilst getting those little pigs in blankets on the table before the Queen’s speech is mounting and for those with lots of family coming over it’s a certainty that there may be more than one dish in the oven at once but how will your oven cope?
Delphine Genouvrier, a SolidWorks Product Manager, recently ran a series of tests using SolidWorks Flow Simulation and Computational Fluid Dynamics to find out for herself. SolidWorks Flow Simulation is a complete 3D fluid flow and heat transfer simulation tool fully embedded within SolidWorks software.
Unfortunately there wasn’t a suitable turkey model available online so instead tests were ran using a nice piece of pork loin, placing it in a sample convection oven to compare whether two pieces of meat would get similar temperature distribution and thus cook at the same time in a uniform manner. As the model used is a convection oven it was necessary to define an internal fan to speed up air flow within the model, heat source was added on the bottom resistance and the Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation was underway.
Thanks to the technical insights provided by CFD analysis we are far more aware of what is happening within the oven, the air path is displayed through the flow trajectories showing the circulation within the oven as well as around the internal components i.e. the pork loin.
We can see if the pieces of meat will get the same heat energy on each tray thanks to the temperature distribution plots shown here. On this occasion it is visible that there is a 13°C temperature difference between the two pork loins which means they are not receiving the same amount of heat energy and thus will not be ready at the same time. So if you are cooking for the masses this Christmas and need to cook two turkeys, pork loins or Christmas puddings in the oven take SolidWorks’ advice and remove the lower one first in order to ensure a memorable Christmas for all the right reasons.
From all of us at Solid Solutions, Merry Christmas!
By Lucy Appleby
Applications Engineer