The main purpose of this tutorial is to learn to set up and process a simulation that makes use of Particle Custom Inlets, which enables you to define specific positions, release times, and orientations for particles.

The scenario considered in this tutorial is a Bottling Line operation that transports filled champagne bottles while also consolidating them into a single line.

You will learn how to:

And you will use these features:

The geometries in this tutorial are composed of:

These 14 items will be imported as .stl files, which can be found in the tutorial directory.

To get started with this tutorial, do the following:

To achieve the goals of both safely transporting the bottles and consolidating them into a single line, the 13 conveyors must increase in velocity while the rail lines up the bottles.

For the Motion Frames step, we will create one motion frame for each conveyor belt.

All the thirteen Motion Frames should now be created and assigned to their respective belts.

In addition, each belt should have their Material correctly set to Default Belt.

Now that the Motion Frames are defined, we can continue setting up our project.

In this case, we want Rocky to treat the particle as Concave in order to preserve its shape.

Otherwise, it would convert the geometry to Convex and we would lose some of the Bottle's details.

To properly represent the behavior of a Filled Bottle, we must the change the Center of Mass and the Moments of Inertia of the particle.

This value will be used later to prescribe the desired Particle Custom Inlet position.

For this tutorial, we want the Bottles to be injected at given positions and times.

In Rocky, this is possible by using the Particle Custom Inlet feature, which uses an imported .csv file to define each particle's injection properties.

Within the .csv file, the particle properties are defined as header columns, and each particle is set on a separate row.

The particle properties (and their respective units) you can define in your .csv file are explained on the next slide.

Property columns you can define in a Particle Custom Inlet .csv file:

Note that only the x, y, z, and release properties are necessary for our purposes in this tutorial.

Now, we'll create a Particle Custom Inlet to inject the particles into the domain.

Under File Info, we can verify summarized info, such as the Number of Particles and the Min and Max values of the various Properties that were defined inside the .csv we loaded.

In this tutorial, the height of the bottles is higher than the Rail height (as shown)

As a consequence, a portion of the particles would be outside of the domain if we use the geometries limits as boundaries.

Therefore, we will set the boundary limits manually.

With a 3D View window opened, your Data panel and Workspace should look similar to the below image.

The Simulation Summary screen appears (as shown), then processing begins.

This completes Part A of this tutorial.

Rocky was used to set up and process a Bottling Line simulation.

During this tutorial, it was possible to:

What's Next? If you completed this tutorial successfully, then you are ready to move on to Part B and post-process this project.

The purpose of this tutorial is to use the results from the simulation we set up and processed in Part A to analyze the bottle transportation on the various conveyors.

You will learn how to:

And you will use these features:

A simple way to identify if there are any major obstructions somewhere inside the domain is to plot the Particles Count for each output.

The time plot shows that between approximately 13s (when the first bottle exits the domain) and 23s (when the last bottle is injected), the amount of particles inside the domain remains stable.

This analysis proves that there is no obstruction preventing the bottles from exiting the domain.

The Residence Time of a particle is the amount of time it spends inside the domain.

In a period of continuous operation, all the particles should spend approximately the same amount of time within the domain.

Therefore, the Maximum Residence Time of a given timestep should be stable. Let's verify:

The maximum Residence Time curve shows that during the continuous operation period, each particle spent around 14s inside the domain.

Now we will check if there are any bottles that fall or flip during transport, which is an undesired outcome. We can make use of the particles Y-coordinate to analyze this.

Considering that the Y-coordinate for the particles into the simulation domain is measured from the bottom (as shown below), we can assume that:

To perform this analysis, do the following:

The resulting plot shows that the minimum particle Coordinate : Y is approximately the expected value for all outputs, which indicates that all the bottles remained upright.

Another source of possible damage to the bottles is during impact with other bottles or conveyor components.

To measure the amount of impact, we will use the Relative Average Velocity data that is collected during collisions.

The higher the Relative Average Velocity of a collision, the higher the impact energy (and the more likely for damage).

As a reminder, we already enabled the collection of this data in Part A of this tutorial when we turned on the Inter-particle Collision Statistics module and enabled the Normal Impact Velocity component.

To start this analysis, do the following:

The table shows that the maximum velocity impact occurs at 19.65 s.

The view shows that the highest impact velocity occurs near the final "S-curve" of the rails, when the bottles are conveyed by the fastest belt.

Besides that collision, if we move the slider to investigate times around this point, we see that most of the highest impact velocities occur near this same location.

This completes Part B of this tutorial.

Rocky was used to post-process a simulation of a Bottling Line.

During this tutorial, it was possible to:

What's Next? If you completed this tutorial successfully, then you are ready to move on to next tutorial.