EXTERNAL AERODYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF AN UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE USING POINTWISE & OPENFOAM

Many OpenFoam users worldwide have adopted the Pointwise software for creating high quality grids for their CFD models. This paper highlights one feature of Pointwise, called TRex, that is an automatic unstructured mixed cell mesher. The TRex tool was applied to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) geometry and the resulting mesh run in simpleFoam. Grid quality considerations will be discussed in relation to the TRex user parameters that were applied, for both the surface & volume mesh around the vehicle. The steps for running the mesh in OpenFoam will be outlined such as the scheme and solver settings required to achieve a good converged solution. This case acts as an excellent user-guide for modelling any low speed complex aircraft geometry with Pointwise & OpenFoam.