Fluid-Structure Simulations with OpenFOAM for Aircraft Designs

Multi-physics, high-fidelity simulations become an increasingly important part of industrial design processes. Simulations of fluid-structure interactions (FSI) are of great practical significance – especially within the aeronautics industry – and because of their complexity they require huge computational resources. On the basis of OpenFOAM a partitioned, strongly coupled solver for transient FSI simulations with independent meshes for the fluid and solid domains has been implemented. Using two different kinds of model sets, a geometrically simple 3D beam with quadratic cross section and a geometrically complex aircraft configuration, runtime and scalability characteristics are investigated. By modifying the implementation of OpenFOAM’s inter-processor communication the scalability limit could be increased by one order of magnitude (from below 512 to above 4096 processes) for a model with 61 million cells.