Learning Forum

[Gregory Harrington]

I have a 3d model of an airfoil that is modeled in its installed flow environment. I want to be able to extract data from a curve on the airfoil that is essentially the intersection between an arbitrary plane and the airfoil body, not just a typical XY XZ or YZ directions.

I have the plane created in spaceclaim where the airfoil model is located and I split the airfoil body with the plane to create the curve. The first question is: Can I export points along this curve into a file that I can then import into Fluent?

The second question is: If I can create a file with the curve, how would I then use it in Fluent so I can extract data on the curve? I see I can only make a line object and I don't see anything about being able to create a curve in the surfaces tab.

I think I could do something like this in CFD post but am not very well versed in that software so i would much rather just use Fluent's post-processing capabilities if it's possible.

 

[Rob]

You can import xy data into Fluent, but it's then used to plot graphs: Fluent's older than Excel so we needed some way to compare data! 

In Fluent create an iso-surface of whatever plane you're interested in, before you "create" make sure the surface of interest is also selected. This will give you the intersect of the iso-surface and geometry surface. Whilst it's technically a surface and not a line you can then use it to create xy plots in Fluent. 

[Gregory Harrington]

Thanks for the quick response Rob. I was looking at the Airfoil tutorial in the learning hub and your solution will work for that I'm not sure if it will work for my case.

In the tutorial the airfoil profile is intersected with an XY plane that is at Z=0 by using an isosurface. The surface of constant was chosen as Mesh -> Z-Coordinate and they put the isovalue at z=0. That all makes sense.

In my case, the plane that I'm using is rotated relative to the XY plane so I can't just say one value of z (0) for the isovalue like they did in the tutorial.

I thought of making a new coordinate system on my rotated plane and then just using z=0 on that rotated coordinate system but I don't see how I can change the coordinate system in the isosurface creation menu.

Below is a picture of what my situation looks like.