Virtual engineering

All drainage sys­tems from Geberit are noted for their ex­cel­lent flow be­hav­iour. This is in no small part down to the great work car­ried out by the flow spe­cial­ists – the ex­perts who op­ti­mise vir­tual prod­ucts on their high-per­for­mance com­put­ers until the cor­rect per­for­mance pro­files are achieved.

Geberit uses com­puter sim­u­la­tions to de­ter­mine and op­ti­mise the flow be­hav­iour of san­i­tary com­po­nents, long be­fore the first pro­to­types are made. Doing so en­ables time and money to be saved dur­ing prod­uct de­vel­op­ment while also al­low­ing so­lu­tion ap­proaches to be pur­sued that would be vir­tu­ally un­think­able with­out vir­tual en­gi­neer­ing.

This graphic vi­su­al­i­sa­tion of the Sovent fit­ting is based on data from the com­puter sim­u­la­tion. It shows how the fit­ting brings the water col­umn into a ro­tat­ing mo­tion.

An old trick

This can be il­lus­trated in greater de­tail using the Geberit Sovent fit­ting as an ex­am­ple. This fit­ting is used in high-rises to con­nect the dis­charge pipes from an in­di­vid­ual floor to the dis­charge stack. As part of the prod­uct op­ti­mi­sa­tion process, the aim was to in­crease the prod­uct’s dis­charge rate. The key ques­tions here were: What is the high­est pos­si­ble flow rate in the­ory and to what ex­tent can this value also be achieved in prac­tice? An every­day trick put the flow spe­cial­ists on the right track. If you want to empty a full water bot­tle as quickly as pos­si­ble, you hold it with the open­ing fac­ing down­wards and ro­tate it gen­tly. This makes the water swirl, en­abling an air col­umn to form in the mid­dle of the open­ing. This air col­umn en­sures pres­sure com­pen­sa­tion, which en­ables the water to drain out of the bot­tle at a much faster rate.

Major im­prove­ment in per­for­mance

In­spired by this phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­non, the en­gi­neers set to work at their com­put­ers and added an asym­met­ri­cal kink in the upper sec­tion of the vir­tual Sovent fit­ting. This caused the – also vir­tual – water flow­ing down to ro­tate just like the en­gi­neers had en­vis­aged, cre­at­ing a con­tin­u­ous col­umn of air in the cen­tre. Ini­tial cal­cu­la­tions showed that this de­sign mod­i­fi­ca­tion had sig­nif­i­cantly ac­cel­er­ated the flow rate of the water.

After the com­ple­tion of the sim­u­la­tion work on the com­puter, the first pro­to­types were made and tested under re­al­is­tic con­di­tions in the 24-metre-high waste water tower. The re­sults were clear: In­stalling Sovent fit­tings that had been op­ti­mised from a fluid dy­nam­ics per­spec­tive in­creased the dis­charge ca­pac­ity of a dis­charge stack by 40 per cent.