Will everything you're cooking for Thanksgiving be ready on time? Find out with SolidWorks Flow Simulation.

If you live in the US, you know that Thanksgiving is only a few days away. I’m pretty sure that many of you are looking forward to a family dinner with roasted turkey, stuffing and gravy! But I also know that lots of you (or your wives and mothers) will try to save time by cooking several dishes at the same time.

Do you know if your (or your mother’s) is capable of perfectly and uniformly cooking two turkeys (or two pumpkin pies) at the same time? If not, SolidWorks Flow Simulation can give you the answer using Computational Fluid Dynamics. Flow Simulation is a complete 3D fluid flow and heat transfer simulation tool that’s fully embedded into SolidWorks. It allows any product engineer to better understand the liquid or gas flows in or around a product and its impact concurrently to the design process.

I couldn’t find a good turkey model, so we’ll use a nice piece of pork loin for our test. Let’s take a look at a sample oven model. It’s large enough to contain two pork loins (or pies) for your family dinner:

Will the two pieces of meat get the same temperature distribution in order to be cooked at the same time uniformly? Let’s run two tests and compare results.

Our model is a convection oven, so we simply define an internal fan to speed up air flow inside the oven, add the heat source on the bottom resistance, and run the CFD simulation.

The CFD analysis provides us technical insights to better understand what’s going on. The flow trajectories are a great display of the air path inside the oven, letting us understand the circulation inside it, and around the internal components–the piece of meat in this example:

The temperature distribution plots shows if the pieces of meat will get similar heat energy for each tray:

In this example, when we put two pieces of meat in the oven, there is a solid temperature difference of 13° c between them. They won’t be ready at the same time as they do not receive the same amount of heat energy. So if you’re cooking two turkeys (or pies, or pork loins) this Thursday, remember to take the bottom one out before the top one so your Thanksgiving dinner will be memorable.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Want to learn more about SolidWorks Simulation? Check out our First Look at Simulation video to see how simulation could improve your own designs and reduce prototypes.