Efficient modelling of rotating disks and cylinders using a cartesian grid

Calculations are presented of flow characteristics in the vicinity of disks and cylinders rotating at speeds typical of those found in modern mechatronics machinery. The rotational speeds are slow or intermittent, and the generated boundary layers are laminar and transitional. Comparison is made with existing experimental data and exact, though idealised, analytical solutions. A three-dimensional finite volume procedure with time dependence was employed as the solution method, and two grid geometries were used, namely, axisymmetric and cartesian. Use of a cartesian grid is very important, as it is compatible with the design of the interiors of mechatronics machinery, and present practice is to model these interiors with computationally economical cartesian grids. Expanding grids were generated normal to surfaces for each of the grid geometries so as to capture the thin boundary layers. To alleviate numerical difficulties, when using the cartesian geometry, an expanding and contracting grid was generated normal to the axis of the disks and cylinders with the grid spacing based on a shifted Chebyshev polynomial.