Hi,

I would like to use a commercial software package for modeling turbulence. The flow under consideration is unsteady, incompressible, with Re ~ 1.0e05. The geometry involved is complicated for which I have an ANSYS model (which I believe can be imported in any solver easily). Most importantly, I need to model (and simluate) the interaction of the flow with a structure which forms an obstruction to the flow.

Given loadings (in terms of pressure) from a CFD solver, ANSYS can easily compute the dynamic response of the structure (in bending, torsion, etc) however I would like these displacements to be feeded back to the solver for the next iteration. In this way, I would like to construct an unsteady evolution series of the flow field and the response of the structure to the flow. (Sometimes called flow-structure interaction, or flow induced vibrations).

Does anyone have any experience doing this before? Is there any reason to choose Fluent over CFX or CFDRC? I already have ANSYS but the CFD solver for it (FLOTRAN) is buggy, not easy to work with and at times fails to post-process. A finite volume grid size of 200*200*50 would suffice; I have a single P4, 1GB RAM machine to work with and would need results in reasonable amounts of time.

Please let me know what you think, many thanks!

Ansys now owns CFX. You have to believe that there will eventually be some synergy between Ansys & CFX.

For turbulence modelling, Fluent offers the most turbulence models, including 0-equation and low-Re models. You can read Ansys data into Fluent easily, but it is hard to read Fluent data into Ansys if your OS is Windows. (easier on Unix) regards emre