Hi,

I am new to both CFD and CAD/CAM programs, but am trying to do some CFD work on a turbomachinery problem.

I have been teaching myself SolidWorks and Gambit/Fluent and have a question I am hoping someone can help me with. I want to mesh a 3D aerofoil blade in GAMBIT and I am not sure whether it is better to create it in SolidWorks and import to GAMBIT or create straight away in GAMBIT.

The blade is not simple aerofoil but is made up of 7 different aerofoils along the blade profile. I have managed to create it in Solidworks with lofts but it doesn't import very well into GAMBIT. I then thought to tackle the problem by creating the blade directly in GAMBIT but can't find how to join the 7 different aerofoil faces together to create the blade, as I could with lofting in SolidWorks.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what is the best way to tackle this problem? Thanks in advance for any help with this.

Jenny

Hi Jenny

I not familiar with SolidWorks, so I'm not entirely sure what lofting is. However, you should be able to use the edges of your 7 aerofoil faces to create a skin surface in Gambit. You may have to create and connect multiple skin surfaces for the the various sections of your aerofoil (e.g leading & trailing edges) it depends on how your original faces are defined.

Goodluck

Mark

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the suggestion. I am giving this a go and will see if I can get better results as I wasn't happy with importing the blade from SolidWorks as it created alsorts of weird things in the geometry.

Jenny

Hi there, you have to use gambits gturbo. its a additional tool. with this tool its very easy to generate blades

I have GTurbo but it doesn't work for my specific blade as it has quite a complex profile and the blades are neither centrifugal or axial, but at a specific angle to the backplate, so unfortunately GTurbo doesn't work. I think it is going to be quite a complex 3D model. I am working on a new type of wind turbine by the way.

Thanks for your reply.

hi jenny, your right, for complex geometries gturbo is partly working not very well, i have made the same experiance. i thing you have to search a very good cad specialist who will help you to generate a modell which works in gambit. i dont know a other way....