Tuesday, July 28, 2009

UAV Modeling Tools

I am currently working on developing a UAV for a university project. Unfortunately, the wind tunnels at my school aren't quite big enough for this uav and I don't want to go through the hassle of building a scale model. I have a very accurate SolidWorks model of the aircraft and would like to use OpenFoam to do some analysis ( specifically, I want to find the control derivitives, so essentially I just need to find the pressure distribution on the surface of the aircraft).

Is there a way I can use my SolidWorks model and generate a mesh using an open source software, and than use openfoam to find the pressure distribution on the aircraft. I would prefer to use openfoam ( Its a software I really want to learn), and I would like to use my current SolidWorks model. I know cosmos is an option with solidworks, but I would prefer not to go that route, so please don't go there...

There are a few opensource meshing tools for OpenFOAM. You might have to export Solidwork file as STL for snappyHexMesh
http://www.opencfd.co.uk/openfoam/do...pyHexMesh.html

Or IGES /STEP for NetGen or Gmsh
http://www.hpfem.jku.at/netgen/
http://www.geuz.org/gmsh/

I am not sure if one can get boundary layers with NetGen or Gmsh.
SnappyHexMesh does that, but I find it a bit complicated to use.

tutorial->
http://www.tfd.chalmers.se/~hani/kur...ppyHexMesh.pdf
I forgot to mention EnGrid.
http://www.ohloh.net/p/engrid

I have not tested this one yet. Seems promising.



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