Experimental study and numerical simulation of the flow-induced deformation of filtering media in automotive transmission filters

During the last decade, it has been seen that specialized simulation software is very helpful for accelerating the developmental period and increasing the performance of new filter element designs. An approved example for such a software tool is SuFiS®, a joint development by Fraunhofer ITWM and IBS Filtran, specialized in the prediction of the flow through automatic transmission filters and their filtration efficiency. Due to changes in the operating conditions and the constraints on the available space, flow-induced deformations of the filtering media in the element become a more and more important effect and therefore, they have to be accounted for in the simulations. Previous works on this matter have shown that this is feasible, using a coupled (or co-)simulation approach for flow and elasticity. The approach presented in [2] used different grids for flow and deformation such that a quite costly interpolation procedure was necessary to transfer the obtained data from one grid to the other. For small deformations, a deformable 2D grid in combination with a poroelastic plate model could be successfully used in [3] to remove this additional computational effort. In many relevant practical applications however, the basic assumptions of a plate model (small deformations, thin filtering medium) are not fulfilled. In this paper, we present a computational approach which overcomes the limitations of the previous methods by coupling.