Gallons Per Minute

[rporter8555]

Wish that a water source could be set up which automatically injects a defined volume of flow per time, i.e., gallons per minute.
The idea is to inject flow into a pipe and observe accurate velocity through the pipe into either a tank or a spray nozzle.
Currently this requires a trial and error setup, filling a volume and evaluating time then iterate the source, etc.
What do you think?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Haha, is this totally unrelated to the previous topic in this section from this morning? If so, it might be worth giving a shot sooner than I thought

Cheers!

[rporter8555]

Yup, totally unrelated, I have a client who wants 150 gallons per minute through a 3 inch pipe to a tapered spray nozzle.
No rush on this, something for the wish list. Thought it could give me better initial results, and much less expensive than to build and test and in the lab to see the spray throw distance and pattern.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Affirmative, then it's definitely something to think about. Some issues off the top of my head:
- the source node does not know anything about what the simulator is gonna do with the emitter geometries; Right now the simulator emits from a source on a per-voxel basis - it knows either to add some velocity to this voxel, or some amount of fluid, etc. The simulator does not currently know or calculate the surface area of geometries, or more specifically - the emission area, which could be constrained by polygon ID from the source, or mapped with vertex color or textures.
- sounds intuitive to me that the potential new discharge control must take into account the polygon ID, but must ignore vertex color or textures, since they can be animated and this means their discharge would change depending on whether a larger or a smaller area emits.
- the emission geometry could be skinned or keyed to scale up or down - the discharge should change in this case in order to compensate for the increasing or decreasing surface area of the emitter. Or maybe the discharge should stay constant, but in this case it would violate what you dialed in the discharge control.
- an emitter could be occluded but an obstacle, or could be half way out of the simulator, or could be animated to enter or exit the simulator; Maybe the safest solution for this kind of problem is to have the source emit as if the emitter is always entirely unobstructed.
- gotta add a control allowing to choose from different units - I don't think Max and Maya know about volume units such as gallons - only about linear lengths.

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me like the better approach would be a helper where you dial in the amount of liquid you'd want to produce, the amount of time, and it would adjust the source discharge based on these. The adjustment would take place once you click a button and would not auto adjust the discharge later, until you re-launch the helper again. If the emitter or source settings, shape or condition change, the liquid amount would be violated and this would be fine...

What do you think?

[TubeSmokeGuy]

Max can give you a volume value and a surface area value with the "Measure" tool from the utility tab. The measured values scale fine in realtime during object changes or animations. Maybe you can take this into account.

Im my case i need the emitting source to be animated. Not the mesh, but the position. Cause the filling pipe (water tap) moves into the bottle until its close to the bottles ground. Then it starts filling the bottle. Parallel to the filling process, the pipe moves upwards, so that it allways hovers a little bit above the fill level (it never touches the liquid).
This means, that a static source, which allways must stay at the same position, will not make any sense for my case.

[rporter8555]

Folks, I like your thinking. Having a helper like that would be huge. Being able to adjust the GPM during simulation is like throttling a valve as part of the process and would be extremely valuable.