Aerospace design with unsteady fluid dynamics simulation

Aircraft components are subject to complex physical phenomena – particularly unsteady, turbulent and separated aerodynamic flow. Slightly changing one element of the component can impact the way the whole system performs so affordably capturing these effects, without sacrificing accuracy, is a major challenge for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technology.

Within the Hyperflux project, using research into next-generation high order methods by Dr Peter Vincent and his team at Imperial College London, CFMS and its technology partners Zenotech and ARA have developed a new approach for high fidelity aerospace CFD which delivers improved performance and scalability.

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The use of Computational Fluid Dynamics to predict flow on various objects

Fluids like air and water are all around us, but predicting the way they will flow is still very difficult. Modelling fluid flow using computers is known as CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics).

This video shows CFD results for various flows which are especially difficult to model. Some of these flows are difficult to model because they require extra equations (e.g. the location of the water surface for the fish pass), while some are difficult to model because of how fast the flow is. Many of these flows are unsteady or turbulent, which is especially difficult for CFD because it makes the simulations very expensive, and can make it difficult to get the simulations to converge on the right answer.

The Hyperflux projects invited a number of industry experts to contribute to a variety of test cases. If you have an interesting project which requires our expertise contact us today.

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