Reducing Bottlenecks in the CAD-to-Mesh-to-Solution Cycle Time to Allow CFD to Participate in Design

Abstract

As CFD has matured to the point that it is capable of reliable and accurate flow simulation, attention is now firmly fixed on how best to deploy that CFD as part of a process to improve actual products. This “process” consists of capturing and controlling the geometry of a suitable portion of an aeroengine (e.g., a blade row, or an internal cooling system or a fan-plus-nacelle), building a mesh system, solving the flow and responding to an appropriately visualized flow field by changing or accepting the geometry. This paper looks at that process from the point of view of identifying any bottlenecks and argues that current research should be directed at the CAD-to-mesh-to-solution cycle time rather than, as has been traditional, just looking at the solver itself and in isolation. Work aimed at eliminating some of these bottlenecks is described, with a number of practical examples.

An adaptive simplex cut-cell method for high-order discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of elliptic interface problems and conjugate heat transfer problems

“…then substituting the conditions (14) and (15) into (10) can easily prove the consistency of the scheme. Also, note the jump conditions in (14) and (15) on Σ are equivalent to JûK = an (−) ,…”

“…However, as the interface can be arbitrarily complex and curved or even moving, generating an interface-conforming mesh can be very time-consuming and can require a large amount of human interaction. In fact, mesh generation often represents a bottleneck in the CAD-to-mesh-to-solution cycle, as demonstrated for example in the context of applying computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in industrial design processes [10]. This cycle would be thus significantly shortened and more automated if meshing does not have to conform to the interface, i.e.…”

Influence of various volute designs on volute overall performance

“…It can be di- 5 Comparison of overall performance between different volute designs vided into two main parts. The larger total pressure loss coefficient part is obtained when r 4 equals 203mm, which are corresponding to Cases 6, 7 and 8, respectively.…”

Experimental method study on heat flux measurement on sharp leading edge

“…On the other hand, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) 18 is a widely used numerical simulation method to solve flow and heat transfer problems with complex structures. 19 Therefore, an experimental method based on the inverse heat conduction method and the Matlab and Fluent cosimulation method is proposed in this paper for the heat-flux measurement on sharp leading.…”