The limitations of the crevice model are that it is zero dimensional, transient, and currently limited to two threads that share a boundary.

A zero-dimensional approach is used because it is difficult to accurately predict lateral diffusion of species in the crevice. If the lateral diffusion of species is important in the simulation, as in when a spray plume in a DI engine is in close proximity to the boundary and the net mass flow is into the crevice, it is recommended that the full multidimensional crevice geometry be simulated in Ansys Fluent using a nonconformal mesh. Additionally, this approach does not specifically track individual species, as any individual species would be instantly distributed over the entire ring pack. The mass flux into the domain from the crevice is assumed to have the same composition as the cell into which mass is flowing.

The formulation of the crevice flow equations is inherently transient and is solved using Ansys Fluent’s stiff-equation solver. A steady problem with leakage flow can be solved by running the transient problem to steady state. Additional limitations of the crevice model in its current form are that only a single crevice is allowed and only one thread can have leakage. Ring dynamics are not explicitly accounted for, although ring positions can be set during the simulation.

In this context, the crevice model solution is a stiff initial boundary-value problem. The stiffness increases as the pressure difference between the ring crevices increases and also as the overall pressure difference across the ring pack increases. Thus, if the initial conditions are very far from the solution during a time step, the ODE solver may not be able to integrate the equations successfully. One solution to this problem is to decrease the flow time step for several iterations. Another solution is to start with initial conditions that are closer to the solution at the end of the time step.