Real-World Tools for Engineering Excellence
Samir Khan,
Application Engineer, Maplesoft
For a tool so young, MapleSim has already built an enthusiastic audience of users among Adept Scientific’s customer base.
We thought we’d take this opportunity to update you on two of our most interesting MapleSim user stories.
Dr. Richard Gran helped engineer the digital flight control system for the Apollo Lunar Module in the 1960s. He recently modelled an eight-room house in MapleSim to investigate a new home heating system controller. The model uses a hierarchy of eight rooms as the building blocks. Each room subsystem consists of a thermal capacitance that accounts for the heat stored in the air volume of the room. Heat in the room is conducted to adjacent rooms, above and below, and to the outside. In addition, convection and radiation elements model the heat flow from the room heaters. Eight of these building block subsystems create the house model. The simulation demonstrated that a continuous heating control is more efficient than a controller that uses a bi-metal thermostat.
Dr. Melcarek, a Canadian mining engineer has used MapleSim to model the harmonics of pilot equipment that will potentially be scaled up to increase the yield of silver from a South American silver mine. Traditional approaches of extracting the precious metal from the pulverised ore resulted in a yield of only 6.7%. This was because the ore was encased in silica, making it impervious to leaching by sodium cyanide.
Dr. Melcarek proposed heating the ore on a conveyor equipped with RF coils to precipitate cracks (due to the different expansivities of silver, gold, and silica), followed by mechanical shock. This allowed sodium cyanide to reach the precious metal and increased the efficacy of leaching.
The gold and silver particles, however, had a wide size distribution meaning that only a certain size of particle would be heated. Dr. Melcarek theorized that this could be resolved by heterodyning the coils and offsetting their frequencies.
This would increase the bandwidth of the radiated RF energy, thus targeting a wider range of particle sizes.
Before constructing costly pilot equipment, Dr. Melcarek modelled the harmonics of the conveyor in MapleSim. It took 15 minutes to model the resistive response of a metallic particle in the voltage domain.
Dr. Melcarek commented, “MapleSim provided the evidence that the heterodyning of the RF coils would be sufficient to initiate cracks in a wide range of silica particle sizes”.
For future releases of MapleSim Maplesoft will be introducing usability enhancements that help engineers develop models faster. In addition, there’ll be the introduction of foundation hydraulics components, and enhancements in performance and results management.
You’ll find more case studies and new MapleSim models, templates and components all on the frequently updated, Maplesoft application centre. As a final note, engineers at Adept Scientific, Maplesoft and Maplesoft partners around the world work in a multi-disciplinary team to help you get the most out of your MapleSim applications and evaluations.
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