OpenFOAM

[Jak_o_Shadows]

Has anybody used the software OpenFOAM to analyze plane designs? I'm working on getting it working, but i don't really know much about linux so it's a challenge.

[BMatthews]

A quick check of how they describe it does not show a lot of promise in terms of designing model airplanes. Maybe it would be a suitable tool for minimizing drag in some formats but it doesn't talk much about airflow at various angles of attack or airfoils at all for that matter.

[Andrew McGregor]

Eh? It would be perfect... just really, really seriously complicated.

It is, after all, a general purpose airflow simulator... you could model anything with it. That sort of process is how fullsize planes are done these days.

[zummi]

Hi there

I agree with Andrew. Model aircraft tend to operate in the low Reynolds number flow regimes, and turbulence modelling can be tricky. Since you are going to have both laminar and turbulent flow around the model, a transitional turbulence model might also be required for realistic results.

Having said that, I believe that you should still be able to simulate a model aircraft in OpenFOAM. I have been using OpenFOAM for the last 5 months, and used other commercial CFD [Computational Fluid Dynamics] codes for the previous 4 years. Based on this experience, I would say that the learning curve for OpenFOAM is steeper than for the commercial codes.

A word of warning, CFD could also be an acronym for Colorful Fluid Dynamics. The quality of the output is only as good as the quality of the input, i.e. garbage in garbage out.

Cheers

[Jak_o_Shadows]

thx. I kinda figured that the learning curve would be kinda steep. I mean, it doesn't even have a package install. You gotta do it by hand.

I'm probably not gonna be able to install it for a few weeks/1.5months because i have 2 computers now. I can't connect em both to the internet unless they're running windows.