Hands-on Collaborative Internship

Want to turn cutting-edge CFD into a practical design tool for tire manufacturing? In this internship you'll use OpenFOAM to build and validate a simulation workflow that predicts the shape of rubber as it exits an extrusion die-exploring everything from meshing and rheology to post-processing and visualization. Department The R&D department Rubber Process & Tire Technology (RPTT) serves as a research and technology group (6 employees) to support other departments within VMI in topics related to rubber processing and tire technology. In that role RPTT researches current and potential promising topics relate to processing rubber compound. It additionally supports product groups to make the right design decisions to shape rubber in the right way in their machines. What are you going to do? In this project you'll tackle a real industrial CFD challenge: predicting the shape of a rubber strip after it exits an extrusion die using OpenFOAM. You'll build the simulation workflow end-to-end-starting with creating and comparing meshes (e.g., with snappyHexMesh, Salome or Ansys Mesher), then diving into the governing equations and how OpenFOAM solves them (Finite Volume Method, solvers and numerical schemes). Next, you'll set up realistic rubber behavior using appropriate h igh-viscosity generalized Newtonian material models, define initial and boundary conditions, and run transient multiphase simulations for flow inside and out of the die. As you iterate, you'll perform parameter studies (mesh, time step, solver settings, rheology parameters) to improve stability and realism, and you'll use ParaView plus Python/Matlab to turn the results into clear visualizations, plots and/or videos. Throughout the project you'll document your steps and settings into a repeatable, standardized "recipe" so the workflow can be reused as a future design tool-optionally extending the work to the extra challenge of asymmetric dies. Goals - Develop an algo...