Computational Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer for Maze Solving and Piping Applications

Abstract

Abstract Solving mazes is an important scientific and engineering topic with various applications in the areas of image processing, intelligent traffic control, pipe network flow assurance, etc. There are many existing algorithms for solving mazes, which are mostly in the field of computer science. In this paper, two engineering approaches using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational heat transfer (CHT) are presented. The hypothesis is, if a maze is injected with water or heat from the entrance, the water and heat should find their way to the exit naturally. If we can visually track the movement of the water and heat, the maze pathways can be shown and the maze can be solved. Computer simulations using both CFD and CHT methods were conducted to test the hypothesis and to analyze the performance of the two methods. The results show that both flow and heat from the inlet of the maze successfully find the outlet and the movement of water and heat can be clearly shown by the visual tools from the simulation soft, therefore the maze is successfully solved by both methods. The performance and simulation time between CFD and CHT approaches were compared, and it can be concluded that using CHT is more efficient than CFD since the heat transfer equations are less expensive to solve. In addition, a maze-solving-related application was presented in the paper to analyze the flow distributions of pipes in a network arrangement.