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Fluid inertia in Simscape hydraulic

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Amodio
Amodio on 21 Jun 2024
Commented: Yifeng Tang on 28 Jun 2024
Hi,
I have had the impression that Simscape does not account for the fluid inertia in an hydraulic cylinder.
For example when the piston is at the end of its stroke, does Simscape account for the effect of inertia forces on the piston caused by the deceleration of the fluid?
I saw there is a "Fluid Inertia" block but it seems specific for fluid aceleration/deceleration in pipes.
Any help is much appreciated.

Answers (2)

Yifeng Tang
Yifeng Tang on 24 Jun 2024
Hi Amodio,
I don't think the actuator blocks model the inertia of the fluid inside. The "cushion" can be used to model some end-of-stroke behavior from flow restriction devices, but not the fluid inertia itself.
That said, I think there may be a trick we can play to mimic some effect from the mass of the fluids inside the cylinder. How about adding the mass of the fluid to a mass/inertia block attached at the R port, where the piston mass/inertia is usually also attached to? Something like this:
The piston position is used to calculate the fluid mass (*area*density), and it's added to the total mass at the R end. It assumes the fluids inside is moving at the same velocity of the piston (good assumption?).
Do you think this may work? I'm not sure what a good test case would be so I can't verify.
  6 Comments
Amodio
Amodio on 27 Jun 2024
Hi Yifeng
thanks a lot for the useful advice. I have now converted the model and finally can add fluid inertia in the pipes.
Once enabled the Fluid Inertia in each pipe, then I have a problem when a valve is being opened/closed the fluid pressure falls locally and very sharply causing the simulation to crash with the following error:
Error:An error occurred while running the simulation and the simulation was terminated
Caused by:
['*/Solver Configuration1']: At time 0.175692, one or more assertions are triggered. See causes for specific information.
Pressure at port B must be greater than or equal to Minimum valid pressure. The assertion comes from:
Block path: */*/*/* *
Assert location:
o (location information is protected)
o (location information is protected)
Any idea how to avoid this.
Many thanks!
Yifeng Tang
Yifeng Tang on 27 Jun 2024
need to see the model to give suggestions :)

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Amodio
Amodio on 28 Jun 2024
Understand. However I cannot share it for confidentiality.
Any chance you can give me some guidelines on potential sources for this error?
I have the suspect that when I activate the fluid inertia and the poppet valve opens, then in the pipe adjacent to it the flow goes from zero speed to a certain speed very quickly and the pressure drops sharply (ultimately going negative) --> this cause the run to crash.
  1 Comment
Yifeng Tang
Yifeng Tang on 28 Jun 2024
That will be very difficult :(
Wild guesses and things to try:
(1) does the poppet valve has an opening dynamics option? If yes, enable it and use a reasonable time constant.
(2) use a fluid property block and make the entrained air fraction non-zero, e.g. 0.005.
(3) replace a long pipe with a few shorter pipes, to capture the propagation of pressure wave.
Do you have access to MathWorks' account team at your company/university/institute? If there is an NDA in place, you may share the model with MathWorks' application engineering team for more relevant advice. You can also try Tech Support, if you don't know who to reach out to initially.

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