Hello! I am starting to do works on automatic-optimization methods for shapes of object in Star-CD application. What are the recommended softwares for such purpose? And what are the known issues or problems?

i have seen it done in mode-frontier

Can i say this auto-optimization area is still new in CFD? POssibly there are still big issues unresolved in CFD itself (e.g. auto grid refinement/adaptivity) hence, disallowing it from automation processes? Would the Star-CD community agree with me on this?

It's not new but sometimes a bit tricky to define the deformation in a parametric way.

http://www.optimalsolutions.us/ http://www.fe-design.de/fileadmin/ne...poOptFluid.pdf http://www.fe-design.de/fileadmin/do..._datasheet.pdf http://www.esteco.com/

That was helpful, thank u. However, morphing the shell surface can be performed using known tools such as Hypermorph by Hypermesh.

The concern was regarding adaptivity of the volumesh upon morphing to the surface. Would sculptor be able to retain volumesh quality and aspects as per original volumesh after the surface is morphed? (For apple-to-apple comparison). Or, would it need an extra loop of manual grid refinement to identify suitable gradients and after that re-volumeshing and re-running in a sub-loop? This is the known approach but it could become evident that this extra loop of manual grid refinement upon surface modification is breaking down the CFD auto-optimization process flow. A solution could be auto-adaptive refinement whereby an algorithm in the solver identifies suitable gradients and perform grid refinement while solving. Would there be a similar or better and available solution to this?

Sculptor retains the mesh quality quite good.

Another approach is, to morph the surface with any of the tools and use GridPro to recalculate the mesh. This dosn't break the automatic process.