[philippconen]

Dear Foamers,
actually, I am writing my thesis with the title: "Digital twin of an aircraft wing". While this includes work on simulations, there is a huge amount of other tasks that need to be done, and so my timeslot for simulations is quite short ().
So please keep this in mind while finding mistakes.

My goal for the simulation part is to get a fluid-structure-interaction (FSI) simulation running with OpenFOAM. For this approach, I would like to mix the Solids4Foam Toolkit (https://www.researchgate.net/profile...am-toolbox.pdf) with the "microBeamInCrossFlow" on the one and the NACAFoil-OpenFOAM (https://github.com/petebachant/NACAFoil-OpenFOAM) on the other hand.

In detail, I am working on a mesh for the solid on the inside of the 2D airfoil, that needs to fit the outside mesh. So in the end, the incoming air should perform some forces on the airfoil and display the stress and displacement of the airfoil.

For this project, I have four questions at the moment.
1) Should the plan of such a simulation work out?
2) Is the approach for the solid mesh okay? (see attachments & Github)
3) What went wrong with the actual mesh? (see attachments & Github)
4) Is anyone interested to help me? Meaning some help with code review, improvements, and embedding the project over the thesis furthermore?

The FSI Toolbox is running with OpenFOAM-Extend-4.1 and the NACAFoil-OpenFOAM with OpenFOAM 3.1 - only if you want to test things.
You can find the actual work on Github:
https://github.com/Philipp-Conen/NAC...FOAM-SolidMesh
I also attached some pictures of the actual mesh approach.

I would be happy about any feedback or questions!

Greetings
Philipp

[piu58]

A few thoughts:

I recommend to split the simulations. Simulate the external forces first without any deformations of the wing. So you need only to mesh the air.
With that results simulate thes structure of the wing, may be with FEM.
If necessary make a final simulation of the forces with the deformed wing, which needs to be meshed again.

If you want result you can trust in you need a decent mesh. What you have is rather strange. Or I don't understand your pictures.

[philippconen]

Dear Uwe,

thanks for your time to think about my project!

I also thought about this way, i.e. to solve the fluid in OpenFOAM and with this results going into ANSYS Mechanical.
But firstly, I thought a fully open-source solution would be more attractive. Secondly, for me, it seems more consistent to have all the data in one place.

So of course, I fully understand your idea. Could you maybe fill this idea with some specific reasons why you don't think that Solids4Foam is not the best choice here?
Also, is there a FEM Software besides ANSYS you could recommend?

Regarding the mesh, you are completely right. I have not that much experience in meshing and I was not sure if there would be a better way to split this mesh region. So the right splitting is the first problem here. The second problem with the mesh is, that the result of the split mesh is not what it should look like (see MeshError.png). The split regions on the top failed completely. Thus, I would be really happy if someone has an idea of what lead to the failure and if one has a better idea of splitting the mesh region since this problem would follow me also in ANSYS.

Greetings
Philipp

[philippconen]

Dear Foamers,

I have a small update on my mesh issue.
1) I added some more points on the right side of the airfoil (see attachments).
2) The mesh is now "running" under 0 degrees.

I am still working on an alternative to split the mesh to get fewer skewed cells. Any specialist thoughts on this?

Also, I am working out an alternative on Ansys, which I would also like to share if anything serious happens there.

The next steps are:
1) Adapt the meshing program for angels unequal to zero.
2) Set up an FSI Case with the mesh

Greetings
Philipp