Running a single CFD simulation rarely provides enough information to find a good hydraulic or aerodynamic design of a component. In many cases the poor engineer has to wrestle an awfully long list of design parameters into a state-of-the-art shape. Luckily, OpenFOAM and DAKOTA together provide an almost ready-to-use solution just for that: Sensitivity analysis(long […]
I’m building a wind turbine and as you might imagine, the blades are Ye Royale Paine In Me Buttocks. Too big for a CNC, too exposed for a 3D print, too complicated to be made by hand. I decided to make blades from pipes. This simplifies the build but now how do I know how
The Old-Fashioned blockMesh BlockMesh is the weapon of choice for directly generating rather simple meshes of channels, pipes, 2D-stuff etc. Those are mostly internal flows. With external flows, life gets tough much quicker. Consider a very simple case of a 3D flow past a cube. You now need this many blocks: But the cube itself
Merging Files If you’re using SALOME to create STL files for meshing you can only save separate surfaces to separate files. That’s not a problem if you’re using snappyHexMesh but cfMesh only takes an STL file that has all surfaces combined and named. I wrote a simple Python script that does that for you. Save
