What's the standard unit for forces?
 

Hello there,



So i imagine this question will be very silly and easy for some of you but i haven't found a post that helped me here.


So i'm simulating a Wing travelling through water and air at 12.5m/s. Another student is simulating it in x-foil since the professor wants to compare the two.


However his results are around 10kN+ whereas my openfoam log gives me a value of 900 (which i assume is in Newton). That's after 500 timesteps and looking at the values they seem to have converged.



Does anyone have an idea why such a large difference could occur? i've checked the values i input for velocity, densities etc and so far haven't come up with any faults.



I've seen something about forcecoeffs but i can't really wrap my head around what it does.



Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I assume you're making use of the forces function in contorlDict? Have you made sure to input your density (rho) here? This is over top of the kinematic viscosity specified in transport properties

Yes that's the function I'm using. I've got the Rho specified both in the function in controldict and the transport properties etc.

If you are simulating a 2D geometry your forces are still in N. So you need to figure out how deep your mesh is in the third dimension and might have to multiply it by a factor to get the actual force for the entire length of the wing. Aside from that you have to make sure the density is included. Every OpenFOAM input is in SI units. So density in kg/m³ etc.

forceCoeffs calculates the drag and lift coefficient from your forces. It basically devides them by a factor.

My Mesh is a 3D domain around 10 meters long and 9 meters wide so it's definitely not a 2D Mesh. I'll try around with the coeffs a bit.

You've made sure your reference area is the blade chord*width?