spatial distribution of force coefficients in paraview&openfoam
 

hi everyone!

i am now doing some simulations about flow around a 3D cylinder with OpenFOAM. The simulation goes well but i got a problem with post-processing.

basically i need to get the spatial distribution of the force coefficients on the surface along the span wise direction, as is shown in the picture below.
http://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image...00072X-gr7.jpg

i know that adding functions in controlDict could give me the force coefficients, but that seems to be the average value along the whole cylinder, which is not what i want.

is there anyone who knows how to do this in paraview?
any help is appreciated!

Paraview can only work with data that has been written to disk. AFAIK the forcesCoeffs-functionObject doesn't write it to disk. What you can do is replicate the calculations it does using the primitive Values (density, velocity etc) that get written. For that you can use the (Python)-Calculator in Paraview. There are other ways too but these involve programming and/or ThirdPArty-software