Hi,

I would like to use a commercial software package for modeling turbulence. The flow under consideration is unsteady, incompressible, with Re ~ 1.0e05. The geometry involved is complicated for which I have an ANSYS model (which I believe can be imported in any solver easily). Most importantly, I need to model (and simluate) the interaction of the flow with a structure which forms an obstruction to the flow.

Given loadings (in terms of pressure) from a CFD solver, ANSYS can easily compute the dynamic response of the structure (in bending, torsion, etc) however I would like these displacements to be feeded back to the solver for the next iteration. In this way, I would like to construct an unsteady evolution series of the flow field and the response of the structure to the flow. (Sometimes called flow-structure interaction, or flow induced vibrations).

Does anyone have any experience doing this before? Is there any reason to choose CFX over Fluent or CFDRC? I already have ANSYS but the CFD solver for it (FLOTRAN) is buggy, not easy to work with and at times fails to post-process. A finite volume grid size of 200*200*50 would suffice; I have a single P4, 1GB RAM machine to work with and would need results in reasonable amounts of time.

Please let me know what you think, many thanks!

Hi Sujit, you are talking about real cutting edge work now. CFX has been coupled with Ansys for some previous work. The best approach would be for you to speak with your CFX support engineer or account manager. Lik I said this is cutting edge, and at present the interface is not included within the GUI. The other thing to bear in mind is that you are wanting to model unsteady flow behaviour, however you state that you have time constrains. This may well be a problem, as this type of work usually requires small time steps and often large mesh's. Contact CFX, I'm sure they will be very willing to help. Bob