Do Pressure Inlet Flow Direction Components Need to Be Normalized?
 

Hi,

I'm using FLUENT for a project at work which is essentially a continuation of a model someone else previously worked on. I am currently considering which boundary conditions can be carried over to my model.

The issue I am running into is while specifying the flow direction at the pressure inlet. The coordinate system used is cylindrical. The person who originally set up the model used a radial profile for the radial and tangential flow components, but for the axial component he/she just set it constant to 1. Clearly, the result is that the overall magnitude of the flow direction vector is greater than 1, so my question is does the flow direction vector for a pressure inlet need to have a magnitude of 1 (normalized) or can it be any value.

My next question (to which only the original modeler can answer) is were the radial and tangential components scaled to give an axial component of 1 for every data point of the profile, so that they didn't require a profile for the axial component? However that seems like it would be more effort than it is worth. The other possibility is that they simply made a mistake in specifying these parameters.

Thanks,

Scott