BUILDING A BUSINESS: KARBAN STREAMLINES PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT WITH CONVERGE

When you’re starting a business, you need every edge you can get. Anything that can save you time, reduce your expenses, or help you design higher quality products is an advantage—and even better if you find a solution that can do all three.

 

When you’re starting a business, you need every edge you can get. Anything that can save you time, reduce your expenses, or help you design higher quality products is an advantage—and even better if you find a solution that can do all three.

When Karan Bansal founded his company Karban Envirotech Private Limited, he knew computational fluid dynamics (CFD) would be the key to getting his business off the ground. Karban is an innovative home appliance company based in India that aims to address consumer needs while also prioritizing efficiency and sustainability.

“We decided to start Karban because we found a gap in the market where we felt consumer appliances were not sustainable, especially when scaling to not just the Indian market but the worldwide market,” said Karan. “We wanted to bridge that gap and provide products that are focused on design, energy efficiency, and sustainability.”

The company’s first offering, the Karban Airzone, is a combination of a bladeless ceiling fan, air purifier, and chandelier light. The idea behind the product is that combining three appliances into one will help reduce clutter in people’s homes and offices, increase energy efficiency, and reduce the amount of plastic and packaging waste.

To come up with the initial design for their product, Karan and his team relied heavily on CFD modeling. “Hardware is hard,” said Karan. “It’s expensive and capital-intensive, and prototyping is also very expensive. But using CFD, we could design all of the CAD models that we wanted to try out and simulate them to assess their performance. Then we could optimize our initial designs using CFD to figure out how to achieve the maximum amount of air flow for the least amount of energy.”

For Karan, using CONVERGE was an obvious choice. Having previously worked at Convergent Science on the New Applications team for six years, he was well acquainted with CONVERGE’s benefits for flow-related devices.

“Of course, the best feature is not making any mesh,” said Karan. “Especially when you’re creating so many design iterations, meshing can be very complicated and it can consume a lot of your time. So the best feature was the automated meshing and Adaptive Mesh Refinement capabilities.”

Because their product contains a number of rotating components, CONVERGE’s multiple reference frame (MRF) approach also came in handy. The MRF approach simplifies simulations that include moving geometries by modeling the moving geometry as stationary. The user specifies a region of the domain as a local rotating reference frame, which moves relative to the stationary, or inertial, reference frame. This method provides accurate results at a fraction of the computational cost required for a fully moving geometry simulation.

In addition, the Karban team made use of CONVERGE’s porous media modeling to simulate filtration in the air purifier. In porous media, the flow occurs through a region of fine-scale geometrical structures which are too small to be resolved directly. Porous media modeling simulates these effects by converting them to distributed momentum resistances.

Using this combination of features, the Karban team conducted around 50-60 design iterations to identify the design they wanted to build as a prototype. The physical prototype demonstrated very similar results to what they observed in their CFD simulations, confirming the accuracy of their model. After the initial prototype, they conducted a few more rounds of CFD modeling to further optimize the design, resulting in their first product offering.

Integrating CFD into their design workflow, Karban was able to save a significant amount of time and money during their initial prototyping and optimization phases. And they plan to continue taking advantage of this tool in the future

“The future includes more aerodynamic products, so CFD will be an integral part of any product that we design from here on out,” said Karan. “We plan to use CONVERGE for all of our next sets of products to get to that optimized appliance design that we’re looking for.”

Published on: https://convergecfd.com/blog/building-a-business-karban-streamlines-product-development-with-converge