CFD for Process Equipment: Cooling Tunnels, Coating Booths and Cyclones
Flow and thermal CFD on production equipment — cooling tunnels, powder coating booths and cyclone separators — turning airflow guesswork into measured design decisions.
Process equipment is where airflow assumptions get expensive. A cooling tunnel that is 20% short does not announce itself — it shows up months later as inconsistent product.
The problem
Equipment like cooling tunnels, powder coating booths and cyclone separators is usually sized from rules of thumb and previous builds. That works until something changes: a new product, a higher line speed, a different footprint. Then the rule of thumb is silently wrong, and the only feedback is scrap.
Physical trial and error on installed equipment is slow, disruptive and expensive.
The approach
- Flow and thermal CFD (Ansys Fluent, Star-CCM+) on the actual geometry and the actual operating conditions — not a clean-room idealisation of them.
- Cooling tunnels: velocity and temperature fields through the working volume, checking whether every part in the cross-section gets the same treatment, not just the one in the middle.
- Coating booths: airflow uniformity and capture behaviour, to see where the flow separates or short-circuits.
- Cyclone separators: internal flow structure and separation behaviour against the target particle range.
- Reporting that lands: every study ships with its assumptions, mesh and convergence evidence, and a plain-language recommendation section. A contour plot is not a conclusion.
The result
Design decisions made before fabrication rather than after installation. Virtual prototyping typically removes 40–70% of physical prototype cost — and on installed process equipment, the saving is larger still, because the alternative is modifying something already bolted to the floor.
Background
MSc in Marine Engineering (Istanbul Technical University) with a research background in hydrodynamics: CFD studies on supercavitating foils and propellers improved efficiency by 5–10%. That work also covered wind turbine aerodynamics, propeller hydrodynamics and submerged hydrofoils — the same solvers and the same discipline about validation, applied to industrial equipment.
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