Skewers4Dummies
Thermal Analysis of Turducken Cooking Process
Company/ Client
Cooper Union ME408 Prof. Scott Bondi
Role
Project Manager
Skills
3D CAD Meshing Thermal Analysis
Tools
ANSYS Workbench Solidworks Altair Hypermesh
Duration
2022
Overview
Simulating and solivng a transient thermodynamic problem using Altair Hypermesh to mesh complex geometries and run thermal analysis simulations using ANSYS Mechanical Workbench
Cooking a Turducken?
Properly cooking a turducken is a very meticulous process. For this assignment, my team and I developed Skewers4Dummies which are a set of skewers designed to cook a turducken (turkey + chicken + duck) efficiently. The skewers were modeled in CAD to fit the assignment constraints, meshed in Hypermesh to accurately depict the geometries, and analyzed in ANSYS Workbench to observe cook times and percent of turducken burned.
Measuring Burnt [%]
The turducken model was simulated in ANSYS Workbench and ANSYS APDL to determine the percent of turducken burned after the oven and the skewers are turned off. The volume and element temperatures were taken from ANSYS Mechanical APDL. The element table gives the volume of each element and the average element temperature. These values were then exported into a text file for Excel to parse through.
Using Excel, the total volume of the model was found through a summation of the volume of each element. Then, the elements with temperatures exceeded the burnt threshold of 280℉ were sorted out from the list to be considered as a burnt element. Furthermore, the script is able to retain which elements were burnt at any given time step to ensure that no element was double accounted for if it had passed the burnt threshold multiple times. Finally, the percentage burnt is computed by taking the volume of elements burnt divided by the total volume of all elements.
The final percentage burnt is 19%.
Conclusion
The total estimated design time for the Skewers4Dummies© Turducken skewers was estimated to be 144 hours. Each team member spent approximately 36 hours on hand calculations, CAD modeling, simulation, and analysis. Alternate skewer designs such as coils and zig-zags were considered, but ultimately the linear design was chosen for easier use.
Skewers4Dummies© was able to deliver a skewer design that is easy to use and able to cook a turducken in under 6 hours.
