[Vaeaelen]

Hi all!

First of all, apologises if it's not posted in the correct forum.

I need to make a project for the university about the influence of wind in buildings, I do have experience with FEA (Solidworks, Inventor, Abacus, ProEngineer...) but this will be my first time with CFD, I've been advised to use Ansys Fluent, but it is at my choice in the end; I would appreciate if you could please help me with some questions.

-Which should be the best software to calculate the wind coefficients (Cf) and if possible, why to choose that one specifically.

-If there are student licenses for that software and, in case, if they got any cap/limit.

-Which hardware is required? I mean, works well with gpu acceleration? Is there a limit on cores that the software can use or is efficient with?

In case is necessary, I would be interested in local effects around some discontinuities in the building, not in the global effect.

Thanks very much for your help.

Kind Regards.

[Svetlana]

1. In ansys cfd-post force_x can give you the total force that applies to the building in a particular direction. From this and the effective frontal area I think you can calculate the wind coefficient?
2. ANSYS cfx or fluent has student version. It is free for download and is limited to 512K elements in the mesh.
3. They recommend 16GB of RAM (64GB is even better), 2TB disk space, a graphics card, and either Windows or Linux (Red Hat or Suse).

[Vaeaelen]

Dear Светлана,

Thanks very much for your quick reply and answers, it has been very helpful.

I was also interested in local coefficients of the wind due to discontinuities, and how them affect the wind coefficient, I suppose ANSYS Fluent could calculate that, does also other softwares calculate those as well? Is there any "Civil Engineering" Focused software?

Thanks very much for letting me know the limitation of the student version of ANSYS, I see there are other software, may them also have the same limitations, I've check and there are "free" softwares, are them competitive against paid ones for this specific analysis?

Thanks very much.

Kind Regards.