DESIGN OF NOVEL COOKING UTENSIL :

A COMPUTATIONAL INVESTIGATION
UNDER THE SUPERVISION
OF

Prof. MIRZA FAISAL S. BAIG

PRESENTED BY:
MOHAMMAD UMAIR
MOHD. PERWEZ ALI
FAIZAN HUSSAIN

DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

ZAKIR HUSSAIN COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY
ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY
ALIGARH (INDIA)
2015

CONTENTS
1. Introduction
1.1 Motivation
2.2 Fins (Extended Surfaces)
2. Objective and Problem Description
2.1 3D model of the sauce pan
2.2 Mesh generation
3. Computational Methodology
3.1 Governing equations
3.2 Overview of the solver
3.3 Numerical schemes
3.4 Boundary conditions
4. Results
5. References

1. Introduction
Conventional cooking utensils such as saucepans, pressure
cooker are not very efficient.
A large amount of energy is lost simply in heating the pan,
rather than boiling the water.
It means a lot of the heat is dissipated into the air.
So, it is a problem which is directly associated with the design
of the utensil.

Figure 1.1: A conventional sauce pan

Flare pan
The "Flare" Pan is a saucepan designed by University of
Oxford engineer Thomas Povey that borrows its design
aspects from jet and rocket engines.
The saucepan called Flare has a series of fins on the sides
which direct the flames quickly and evenly.
The main body is made up of Aluminium while the handles are
of stainless steel.
The flame from a stove rises up around a conventional pan and
a lot of that heat is dissipated into the environment.
With a Flare Pan, the fins capture a lot of heat that would
otherwise be wasted.

Flare pan continued..

The temperature of the pan rises quickly while the
stainless steel handle doesnt reach the same level.
A number of tests were conducted and the device was
found to be more efficient than the ordinary sauce-pans.
One added benefit is the even heat distribution.

Figure 1.2: A Flare pan

1.1 Motivation
The most obvious draw of the pots and pans might be the fact that
you can cook much faster with themin tests, water came to a boil
3.3 minutes faster than in a normal pot.
Theenergy savingsare also large. "A conventional pan of the
same size uses 44% more gas," explains Povey.
This is quite a significant saving, but also gets people thinking
aboutenergy consumptionwith a product that is very visibly
consuming energy.
Therefore, a 3D study is needed for investigating what is actually
happening in and around the saucepan when fins are attached on its
outer periphery that causes the rise in the heat transfer rate.
And what shape, size and number of fins will give the optimum heat
transfer rate.

1.2 Fins (Extended Surfaces)

In the study ofheat transfer, afinis a surface that extends from an
object to increase the rate of heat transfer to or from the
environment by increasingconvection.
The amount ofconduction,convection, orradiationof an object
determines the amount of heat it transfers.
Increasing thetemperaturedifference between the object and
theenvironment, increasing the convectionheat transfer coefficient,
or increasing thesurface areaof the object increases the heat
transfer.
Most often it is noteconomicalor it is not feasible to change the first
two options.
Adding a fin to an object, however, increases the surface area and
can sometimes be an economical solution to heat transfer problems.

Figure 1.3: Fin configurations: (a) straight fin of uniform crosssection on plane wall,
(b) straight fin of uniform cross-section on circular tube,
(c) annular fin, and
(d) straight pin fin

2. Objective and problem

description
In this work, numerical simulation of heat transfer
process is carried out in and around the saucepan with
fins attached on the outer periphery of the pan.
And a comparison is made between an ordinary pan and
a Flare pan.
The fins work by creating channels along the exterior of
the pot that guide the flames further along its surface,
keeping them in contact with the pan and heating it
more thoroughly.

This work includes:

Building a 3D model of the saucepan with a heat source
of uniform heat flux under it.
Generation of unstructured inside the cubical domain,
inside the solid body of the saucepan, in the water and
on the surface of the heat source using different
techniques.
Numerical simulation of the heat transfer process using
governing equations with appropriate boundary

2.1 3D model of the sauce pan

A 3D model of the saucepan has been created using
ICEM CFD with the dimensions as follows:
Outer diameter = 170 mm
Inner diameter = 160 mm

Figure 2.1: Top view of the pan

 Dimensions of the fins:

Length = 10 mm
Width = 5 mm
Height = 60 mm

Figure 2.2: Dimensions of the fins

 Dimensions of the stove:

Diameter = 170 mm
Height = 75 mm
Water level = 55 mm

Figure 2.3: Dimensions of the stove and the

pan

 Dimensions of the cubical domain around the pan:

1000 mm 1000 mm 1000
mm

Figure 2.4: Isometric view of the cubical

domain

2.2 Mesh generation

Incomputational fluid dynamics, meshing is a discrete
representation of the geometry that is involved in the
problem.
Essentially, it assigns cells or smaller regions over which
the flow is solved.
Several parts of the mesh are grouped into regions
where boundary conditions may be applied to solve the
problem using numerical techniques.

Deciding the type of mesh

If the accuracy is of the highest concern then
hexahedral mesh is the most preferable one.
The density of the mesh is required to be sufficiently
high in order to capture all the flow features but on the
same note, it should not be so high that it captures
unnecessary details of the flow, thus burdening the CPU
and wasting more time.
Whenever a wall is present, the mesh adjacent to the
wall is fine enough to resolve the boundary layer flow
and generally quad, hex and prism cells are preferred
over triangles, tetrahedrons and pyramids.

 Unstructured mesh has been used for the simulating the

heat transfer process in the pan.
Triangular elements have been used on all the surfaces
while tetrahedral elements have been used inside the
domain using the Robust Octree and Delauney mesh
generation algorithms.
The global mesh size was varied from 8 to 32 in order to
coarsen the mesh.
The global element scale factor was taken as 3.5.

 Mesh size at the bottom surface: 8

Mesh size on all the side surfaces: 16
Mesh size on the pan surface: 0.2 and transition ratio: 1.2
Mesh size inside solid pan body: 0.2
Mesh size on the water surface : 0.2
Mesh size on the surface of stove : 0.2 and transition ratio: 1.2

Figure 2.5: Top View of mesh

around the pan

Figure 2.6: Top View of mesh inside

the domain

Figure 2.7: Isometric view of a

planar section

Figure 2.8: Isometric view of

meshing in cubical
domain

3. Computational methodology
The discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations, the
pressure velocity coupling and the numerical solution of the
resultant matrices constitutes the bulk of the methodology.
Fortunately, most of these methodologies have been
extensively covered in various research papers and text
books, so that only those portions that relate directly to the
implementations on current work is presented here.
This section is focused on the governing equations that
have been used to model the process and the solution
procedures that have been involved in solving the governing
equations with appropriate boundary conditions.

3.1 Governing equations

The governing equations used to obtain the solutions
are:

r
. v 0

Continuity Equation:

t
where:

v is the flow velocity

is the fluid density

Navier-Stokes Equation:

where:
p is the pressure
T is the deviatoric component of the total stress
tensor
f represents the body forces acting on the fluid per
unit volume
v is the flow velocity

Energy Equation:

Dp
h

.(hV )
.(k T )
Dt
t

where:
h is the specific enthalpy
is dissipation function representing the work done against
viscous forces which is irreversibly converted into internal
energy, defined as:

k is the thermal conductivity of the fluid

3.2 Overview of the Solver used

Pressure based solver was used to solve the governing
equations in which the pressure field is extracted by solving
a pressure or pressure correction equation which is obtained
by manipulating continuity and momentum equation in such
a way that the velocity field, corrected by the pressure,
satisfies the continuity.
Since the governing equations are nonlinear and coupled to
one another, the solution process involves iterations
wherein the entire set of governing equations is solved
repeatedly until the solution converges.

3.3 Numerical schemes

For
transient simulations, the governing equations must be discretized in both
space and time.
The spatial discretization for the time-dependent equations is identical to the
steady-state case.
Temporal discretization involves the integration of every term in the differential
equations over a time step .
Second order upwind scheme was employed for spatial discretization.
QUICK scheme was employed for discretization of momentum equation.

 PISO scheme was used for pressure-velocity coupling.

Bounded Second Order Implicit Time Integration was
used for temporal discretization.
Least Squares Cell-Based Gradient Evaluation technique
was used for the evaluations of Gradients and
Derivatives.
Initialization of the solution was carried out using Hybrid
Initialization.

3.4 Boundary conditions

Wall boundary conditions:
No-slip boundary conditions:
In viscous flows, the no-slip boundary condition is enforced at
walls by default. This can be represented mathematically as .
No-slip condition has been provided at the peripheral walls of
the solid pan and its bottom. The no-slip condition is the default,
and it indicates that the fluid sticks to the wall and moves with
the same velocity as that of the wall, if it is moving.

Free-slip boundary conditions:

The free slip boundary conditions are provided at the walls of the outer cubical
domain by specifying the components of shear stress on the walls as 0. This can be
mathematically represented as:

x y z 0
Marangoni stress
ANSYS FLUENT can also model the shear stresses caused by the variation of
surface tension due to temperature. The shear stress applied at the wall is given by

where

is the surface tension gradient with respect to temperature

which has been taken as -0.0002 N/m-K for water free
surface
is the surface gradient

Thermal boundary conditions:

Heat flux boundary conditions:
A constant heat flux of 1000 W/m 2 has been provided at the
bottom of the pan.

Boundary conditions at the two-sided walls:

If the wall zone has a fluid or solid region on each side, it is

called a twosided wall. When you read a mesh with this
type of wall zone into ANSYS FLUENT, a shadow zone will
automatically be created so that each side of the wall is a
distinct wall zone.

No additional thermal boundary conditions are required,

because the solver will calculate heat transfer directly from the
solution in the adjacent cells.

Figure3.1: Thermal Conditions as

Specified on the Inner
Surfaces of the
Uncoupled Thin Walls

4. Results
Various methods have been used to generate the mesh such as Robust Octree,
Delauney and Smooth Advancing Front methods. Number of total elements and
nodes have been varied by changing the size and aspect ratio of the elements.
Both methods showed nearly the same results for the same boundary
conditions.
We had varied the time step size from 1 x 10-6 to 5 x 10-4
The temperature on the pan bottom raised from 300 K to 525 K but the
temperature of water varies gradually with time.

 The reason for this problem is due to the improper

coupling between the two-sided wall zones i.e. pan and
the water.
In order to eliminate this problem we have reduced the
thickness of the pan to zero in order to eliminate the
shadow coupling between the two sided wall zones
where the effect of heat transfer was not taking place.
The Shell conduction method was employed to
introduce the thermal boundary condition which is
applied when the thickness of the wall is very small that
is in thin wall boundaries.

 The temperature variations on the pan bottom as

obtained after running the simulation is represented by
the following contours and curves for both the cases.

Figure 4.1: Variation of temperature

on pan bottom

Figure 4.2: Variation of

temperature on pan bottom

Figure 4.3: Variation of temperature on of various

components of pan without fins

 The temperature on the pan bottom has raised to 322.5

K for the flow time of just 0.0008 s when fins are
attached to its outer side.
As we can see clearly there is no heat transfer has been
taken place between pan curved surface, pan bottom
and various other interfaces.
Further investigation is needed to counter the problems
that are arising due to the improper coupling between
the pan bottom and various components of the pan.

5. References
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[3]

S.V. Patankar. Numerical Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow. Hemisphere, Washington, DC. 1980.

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Any Query and suggestions are

extremely welcomed

Thank you