Quad-Copter Simulation
 

I am trying to complete a senior design project building a quadcopter. I am new to CFD, but I have been getting familiar with STAR-CCM+. Can anyone direct me to a tutorial with an analysis similar to that of a model quadcopter?

this is very easy to do with the virtual disk model added in v8.04 - you can combine this with dbfi (6dof), or you could do it using more conventional mrf regions for each rotor and again combining with dfbi, but i am not aware of a tutorial covering all these together - you need to do one each of these special features but they all can be combined

Okay, awesome. So do I actually need the propellers modeled to use the virtual disk model? It seems to me that all I need is the frame of the aircraft, and then I can specify the coordinates and performance characteristics of each propeller using the body force propeller method. Is this correct? Thanks for the help.

the virtual disk blade element method has that advantage that you don't need the geometry and don't mesh the blades, and don't need to run unsteady rigid body motion, so it runs much faster but yields good flow features of the complex flow from a helicopter rotor. but you do need the performance etc details of the rotor

Okay thanks. One more thing: I imported the frame of my multi-rotor copter, and I want to place a blade element model at each of the motor ends. However, I am not sure about the placement of each of these coordinates. Is there any way to find the coordinates of certain points on the model? Also, once I set the origin of each of these virtual disk blade elements on the model, does the program know that the blade elements are attached or part of the model frame?

Create a coordinate system for each motor axis. When you make the coordinate system you have the option of choosing points around a circle - use the motor axis. Not sure what you mean by the second question, can you expand?

the virtual disk tools don't actually 'attach' to the rest of your model - they create the flow field and have a range of special reports documented here in the help

Modeling Physics > Modeling Flow and Energy > Specific Flow Phenomena > Virtual Disk Model > Reporting Virtual Disk Results

so if you want to also do 6dof motion, i think you will need the force reports from each rotor and apply these as external forces on the free body via the report field functions created when a report is created