Setting subdomain inactive in multidomain problem
 

Dear all,

This is just a question to know if ANSYS Fluent can handle problems like these. I have a multidomain problem, where one domain consists of fluid. The rest are solids. I would like to use FLuent to simulate the fluid flow. In order to reduce the demand for memory, I intend to only switch off the other solid domains by meshing only the fluid part and solving only for the fluid part.

The results from the fluid simulations will be used in ANSYS for structural study. Is there anyway to keep the multidomain model for both fluid and structural simulations but somehow, only solve for the fluid part in Fluent and solid part in ANSYS.

Thanks.

EH

Hi,

In Fluent you can turn off equations in the solver but you can't 'turn off' a part of the domain because the boundary conditions would have to be redefined.

It would be very nice if there was some kind of feature where when you deactivate a part of the domain Fluent would ask for new boundary conditions... but we're not there yet!

I have no experience regarding the Ansys part of your question.

Thanks MacFly

My fluid part is contained within a solid part (kind of like a box within a larger box, so in essence, there is no need to redefine the boundary conditions. The fluid boundary conditions are only defined at the boundary of the smaller box.

Now, if I turn off the equations for fluid for the solid part (outer box), does Fluent still solve for the solid part or just consider the flow part inside the smaller box? The idea here is not to mesh the solid part to reduce the memory consumption.

Yes, the situation changes if the box around the fluid is not considered. The fluid-solid interface no longer exists and you would have to define some boundary condition at the limit of the fluid in order to run Fluent.

Once again, you can't turn off equations in a given region of the domain. If you turn off an equation, it's turned off everywhere. And you can't run Fluent with some empty geometry, Fluent expects a mesh within the boundaries.