Computational Fluid Dynamics
ANSYS FLUENT
Overview
ANSYS FLUENT's broad physical modeling capabilities have been applied to industrial applications ranging from airflow over an aircraft wing to combustion in a furnace, from bubble columns to glass production, from blood flow to semiconductor manufacturing, and from clean-room design to wastewater treatment plants.Because of its ability to model in-cylinder engines, aero acoustics, turbo machinery, and multiphase systems, thousands of companies throughout the world use this important engineering design and analysis tool. Its extensive range of multiphysics capabilities makes it one of the most comprehensive software tools available to the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) research community. FLUENT is user-friendly and robust, making it easy for new users to learn and apply to problems of interest in transportation.
The TRACC FLUENT license allows for two simultaneous jobs or pre and post processing tasks using up to 32 processors on the TRACC cluster.
Current TRACC Applications
Researchers from TRACC and the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) are using commercial CFD codes, such as FLUENT, in focused application areas that include analysis of riverbed scour under bridges in flooding conditions and the evaluation of lift and drag forces acting on flooded bridge decks.TRACC, Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center (TFHRC), and researchers at the University of Nebraska and Northern Illinois University are collaborating on the of study CFD-based simulation techniques. Researchers are taking reduced-scale experiments from the TFHRC hydraulics laboratory, providing the data for CFD model development, and producing a validated CFD-based advanced simulation methodology for open-channel flow, with an emphasis on bridge scouring and the forces on bridge structures during floods.
The University of Iowa has been using FLUENT in the study of wind loads on highway sign and traffic signal structures.