Learning Forum

[meganhigley11]

Dear all,

I was wondering if it is possible to create a model, simulate it in Fluent, use the temperature distribution to simulate thermal expansion, then feed that thermally deformed model back into Fluent. I've done the Fluent into Static Structural for the thermal expansion, but I'm so far unable to bring the deformations back into Fluent. A slight complicating factor is that a solid should thermally expand into a fluid region, but as far as I know, that fluid region needs to be deleted in static structural, but I'd need to bring it back for the second Fluent analysis. Let me know if this would be possible and what connections/importing/exporting I would need to do.

[Steve]

If the structural model is simple, you can use Intrinsic FSI which is an FEA solver built into Fluent. The tutorial is here: Chapter 25: Modeling Two-Way Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) Within Fluent (ansys.com)
The other option would be to use System Coupling to couple Fluent and Coupled Field Static or Transient. You can transfer thermal quantities between Fluent and Mechanical as well as force and displacement. I recommend going over this tutorial in the Ansys documentation that shows a 2-way FSI simulation with Fluent and Mechanical. https://ansyshelp.ansys.com/account/secured?returnurl=/Views/Secured/corp/v221/en/sysc_tut/sysc_tut_reedvalve_fluent.html

[meganhigley11]

I'm trying to do the intrinsic two-way coupling from your first recommendation. The problem is that when I try to enable the structure model, I get the error "Structural Model is not available in Workbench. Disabling." It won't even let me enable those calculcations.