CFD and experimental studies on drag force of swimsuit fabric coated by silica nano particles.

In the fourth generation of industrialization, computer analyses have been captured a lot of attentions in many different areas. For achieving accurate and reliable results, understanding experimental phenomena and comparing them to the computer output should be considered a reliable technique. The main purpose of this study is the comparison of experimental result of aerodynamic/hydrodynamic behavior of coated fabric by hydrophobic finishing with computational fluid design (CFD) to optimize the drag force of swimsuit fabric coated by silica nanoparticles. In this study, swimsuit fabric samples were treated by hydrophobic finishing and then wind tunnel setup used for understanding aerodynamic/hydrodynamic behavior of samples. CFD was also used for simulation of swimsuit behavior with the same characteristics of experimental samples. Both experimental and CFD analyses were then compared, and the results were analyzed to provide the optimum parameters of drag force for the swimsuit fabrics. Results showed that using CFD, optimum swimsuit designing parameters can be achieved more accurately. After primary tests for improving CFD output, it was concluded that variables such as number of meshes, turbulence model, and number of iterations play an important role in simulation output. The results revealed that number of 50 meshes, K-epsilon model for turbulence and number of iterations 1,000,000 are the best condition to study the drag force of simulated swimsuit fabrics. The comparison of experimental drag force and simulated drag force reveals that choosing right variants from experimental plays an important role in CFD output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]