Sectional lift and drag coefficients
 

Hi everyone,

I hope you are doing well these days.

I am running a three-dimensional simulation of flow over a circular cylinder using ANSYS Fluent. Now, I want to save transient data of the lift and drag coefficients of the cylinder at different cross-sections over its span (sectional lift and drag). I can only save the transient data of the total lift and drag of the whole cylinder surface, but what I want is the coefficients over the circumference of the cylinder at multiple planes. I have been looking for solutions for quite a long time but I haven't got an answer yet. Does anyone know how to achieve this? Your reply is much appreciated. Thank you for your attention.

Cheers.

no experience here
first come to mind :
you may create thick surfaceslocated at planes you are looking for, rerun simulation and extract the data

Good idea, AlexanderZ!

I am thinking of creating a ring surface surrounding the cylinder at a plane of interest. As long as the thickness of the surface is small enough, it may be considered a circle. This approach seems to be handy and easy to achieve.

Another option is to define hundred of points surrounding the cylinder circumference in a plane. Then, manually calculate the lift and drag by integrating the wall shear stress and pressure with respect to the location of each point. This approach seems to be very demanding, but that is an alternative way I can think of.

Thanks a lot for your suggestion!