DescriptionThis study uses ANSYS Fluent to analyze airflow around a 3D airfoil. Airfoils are key parts in aircraft wings and turbine blades, where they create lift and drag. The research examines pressure, velocity, and wake behavior behind the airfoil at known flow speeds, using CFD to provide accurate results without the cost of physical testing. The project models steady airflow at a maximum of 10 m/s around a 0.5-meter airfoil in a wind tunnel, with air treated as incompressible at constant properties (density: 1.225 kg/m³, viscosity: 0.001003 Pa·s).MethodologyThe geometry consists of a NACA airfoil centered in a large rectangular domain to avoid wall effects, with a uniform inlet flow, a pressure outlet, and symmetry or far-field conditions on the remaining boundaries. The domain is meshed in ANSYS Meshing using unstructured triangles, refined near the airfoil's leading and trailing edges and surfaces for boundary layer accuracy, and coarser further away, totaling roughly 380,000 nodes and 2.1 million elements to balance cost and precision.The simulation uses a pressure-based, steady-state solver in ANSYS Fluent, with a 10 m/s velocity inlet, pressure outlet, no-slip wall on the airfoil, and symmetry at the far-field. SIMPLE coupling is used along with second-order schemes for pressure, momentum, and turbulence, with the k-ω SST turbulence model. The solution runs for 1000 iterations from a standard initialization.AnalysisThe pressure field shows high pressure at the leading edge due to stagnation, with low pressure on the upper surface acting as the primary source of lift and higher pressure on the lower surface. The velocity field shows faster flow over the top surface and a slower wake with trailing-edge vortices, which is the source of drag. Together, these results confirm lift generation from the pressure difference between the upper and lower surfaces, and drag arising from shear and wake effects, with the refined mesh ensuring accurate capture of the boundary layer behavior driving these outcomes.

DescriptionThis project simulates the flow over a NACA 0012 airfoil using ANSYS Fluent, with compressible flow as the central modelling theme. At the freestream conditions studied here, the air can no longer be treated as incompressible — density varies appreciably with pressure and temperature across the flow field — so the simulation is built around a compressible-flow formulation, making it a clear illustration of how that class of flow model is set up and solved. The airfoil is the cross-sectional shape of a lifting surface such as an aircraft wing, a wind-turbine blade or a helicopter rotor, and the aerodynamic behaviour of a given design depends strongly on its profile, which is why different airfoils are selected for different applications. The geometry is defined by familiar parameters: the chord line, the leading and trailing edges, and the angle of attack — the angle between the chord and the oncoming flow direction. In this case the angle of attack is 5°, so the incoming velocity is resolved into a horizontal component of cos5° ≈ 0.996 and a vertical component of sin5° ≈ 0.087. The objective is to examine the airflow behaviour and the pressure distribution around the airfoil and to study the resulting lift and drag forces.MethodologyThe geometry is created in Design Modeler and meshed in ANSYS Meshing with a structured grid of 35,000 cells. Because the flow is compressible, a density-based solver is used — the appropriate choice when density variations are coupled tightly to the pressure and energy fields, as they are in high-speed aerodynamics. For compressible flow, the Mach number must be specified in the boundary conditions; it is the ratio of the flow speed to the local speed of sound (for reference, the speed of sound in air at 25 °C is about 343 m/s). Airfoil simulations of this kind require a far-field boundary condition with the Mach number prescribed for the surrounding flow, set here to 0.6 — firmly in the subsonic-but-compressible regime where compressibility effects are significant and cannot be neglected.AnalysisThe solution produces two-dimensional contours of pressure, velocity, temperature, density and Mach number, together with streamlines around the profile. The results show the highest pressure at the leading edge, where the flow stagnates on direct contact with the airfoil, and the strongest pressure drop along the upper surface. This pressure difference between the upper and lower surfaces is what generates lift. The velocity field mirrors the pressure field exactly, as expected: regions of highest pressure coincide with the lowest velocity, and regions of lowest pressure with the highest velocity — the classic inverse relationship that underlies airfoil aerodynamics, here captured within a fully compressible treatment that also resolves the accompanying temperature and density variations.

DescriptionThis project models a wind tunnel and a specific body placed inside it using ANSYS Fluent, with the goal of investigating the drag force acting on the body. The wind tunnel is one of the most widely used aerodynamic testing tools in use today, enabling experiments on structures such as airfoils, aircraft, and static bodies to study aerodynamic behavior and visualize flow patterns. Wind tunnels can also be used for free-fall tests, examining how airflow affects a falling object, and since forces such as drag significantly influence a body's behavior, quantifying them accurately is essential — a task CFD is well suited to.MethodologyThe geometry is created in ANSYS Design Modeler and meshed in ANSYS Meshing using an unstructured grid totaling 179,542 elements. A density-based (compressible flow) solver is used in this simulation, with the energy equation activated to capture the compressible-flow physics across a range of inlet Mach numbers.AnalysisThe solution produces contours of velocity, pressure, temperature, and related quantities across the studied Mach numbers. The velocity vectors reveal the formation of separation vortices behind the body, and as a result of this separation, flow turbulence in the wake is substantial — noticeably greater than in the rest of the computational domain, illustrating how body geometry drives the wake dynamics that underlie drag generation.

DescriptionA slot is a deliberate gap built into a wing that splits the airfoil into two sections, allowing high-pressure air from below to feed energy into the flow over the upper surface. It's a classic aerodynamic device used to delay separation and boost lift — the same principle behind the leading-edge slots and slats on many aircraft wings. This project simulates the steady airflow over a slotted NACA 4421 airfoil in ANSYS Fluent to quantify exactly how that slot changes the wing's lift and drag.MethodologyThe geometry is built in two dimensions in Design Modeler, with the slot placed near the leading edge so the airfoil is divided into two distinct elements. The domain is meshed in ANSYS Meshing, producing a grid of roughly 260,000 cells resolved around the airfoil surface and through the slot region. The simulation runs as a steady, incompressible case. Air enters the domain at 10 m/s and the airfoil is held at a zero-degree angle of attack, isolating the effect of the slot itself from any change in incidence. Turbulence is handled with the standard k-ε model, and the solver is run to convergence to extract the aerodynamic force coefficients.AnalysisThe solution generates 2-D contours of pressure, velocity, and turbulent (eddy) viscosity. The pressure field clearly shows the stagnation point at the leading edge, where pressure rises sharply as the flow is brought to rest. The computed force coefficients for the slotted airfoil are a drag coefficient of 0.0755 and a lift coefficient of 0.3764. Compared with a plain NACA 4421 at the same zero angle of attack — reported at roughly Cd = 0.06 and Cl = 0.1 — both coefficients rise with the slot present. The lift gain is substantial, confirming the slot's intended job, while the modest drag increase shows the trade-off that comes with it. Together, these results illustrate how to set up a multi-element airfoil simulation, choose appropriate turbulence and solver settings, and extract and interpret lift and drag coefficients to evaluate an aerodynamic modification.

DescriptionThis project simulates the airflow around a 3-D aircraft wing fitted with a slat on the leading edge and a flap on the trailing edge, using ANSYS Fluent.This is a representative compressible-flow case. Near the wing the air moves fast enough that its density can no longer be treated as constant, so the flow must be solved with a density-based solver and the air modeled as an ideal gas whose density varies with pressure and temperature. Capturing these density changes — and the pressure field they produce over the wing — is exactly what the Compressible Flow model is built for.A flap is a small aerodynamic surface on the trailing edge of the wing used to increase lift. Lift is what holds the aircraft up against its weight, and it grows with speed. When the aircraft slows down — as during takeoff and landing — lift drops, so it must be recovered: the flap rotates about its hinge at the trailing edge and increases the effective area of the wing exposed to the airflow. A slat is the equivalent device on the leading edge; it rotates about its hinge to increase the wing's contact area with the air, and it also raises drag, which helps the aircraft land more slowly.The 3-D geometry was built in Design Modeler as a wing with a leading-edge slat and a trailing-edge flap. The model was meshed in ANSYS Meshing using an unstructured grid of 5,658,021 elements.Simulation MethodologyBecause the flow is compressible, the simulation uses a density-based solver with the ideal-gas law for density, and it is run as steady with gravity neglected. Turbulence is handled with the Spalart-Allmaras model, and the energy equation is enabled to resolve the temperature field.For boundary conditions, the inlet is a velocity inlet with components of 271.958 m/s along x and 40.79 m/s along y (a combined freestream of about 275 m/s at a small angle of attack) and a temperature of 305.5 K. The outlet is a pressure outlet at 0 Pa gauge, the wing, flap, and slat are walls with zero heat flux, and a symmetry plane bounds the domain. The flow and the turbulence transport variable are both discretized with a second-order upwind scheme, and the solution is initialized from the inlet conditions.Results & ConclusionAfter solving, two-dimensional contours of pressure, temperature, velocity, Mach number, and density were obtained on a plane cutting through the flow adjacent to the wing, along with path lines and velocity vectors on the same plane and a pressure contour over the wing surface.The contours clearly show the variation of velocity, density, and pressure around the wing. Comparing the pressure contour on the upper and lower surfaces reveals the pressure difference between them, which is the source of the lift force that counteracts the aircraft's weight.

DescriptionCooling of Airfoil Surface by Lateral Hole Air Inlets CFD Simulation examines how lateral cooling holes can be used to manage surface temperatures on an airfoil exposed to high-temperature conditions, a technique widely used in aerospace thermal management. This ANSYS Fluent study focuses on the interaction between the external airflow and the cooling air ejected from lateral inlets, aiming to understand how that interaction affects surface temperature distribution and overall cooling effectiveness.MethodologyThe airfoil geometry incorporates a defined arrangement of lateral cooling holes, with the mesh built to resolve both the airfoil surface and the intricate geometry around each hole. External flow conditions — freestream velocity, temperature, and pressure — are defined alongside the cooling air inlet parameters, including flow rate, temperature, and pressure at the lateral holes. Turbulence, heat transfer, and compressibility models are selected to capture the coupled fluid-thermal behavior, with particular attention to how the cooling jets exiting the lateral holes mix with the external boundary layer flow.AnalysisThe simulation produces surface temperature contours that reveal how effectively the lateral hole cooling reduces temperatures across different regions of the airfoil, along with insight into thermal boundary layer development and its influence on cooling performance. Cooling effectiveness is quantified using standard aerospace thermal management metrics, allowing different hole configurations and blowing ratios to be compared and optimized. These results connect directly to real-world applications such as turbine blade and vane cooling in gas turbine engines and thermal management of hypersonic vehicle surfaces, where controlling surface temperature under extreme conditions is critical to component durability and performance.

DescriptionThis project simulates film cooling on a gas turbine blade — the technique that lets turbine blades survive gas temperatures well above their material limits by holding a thin layer of cool air against the surface. The cooling air, bled from the compressor stage, is fed through internal channels and ejected through discrete holes to form a protective film over the blade.MethodologyThe study is set up as a conjugate heat transfer (CHT) problem: the fluid domain (hot gas and cooling air) and the solid blade are coupled at the walls, so heat conducts through the blade while the external hot gas and the internal/film cooling air exchange heat with it simultaneously. Turbulence is modeled with k-ω SST, which resolves both the near-wall film behavior and the free-stream mixing between cool and hot streams. Geometry is built in Design Modeler, meshed in ANSYS Meshing, then converted to a polyhedral mesh (~2.7 million cells) in ANSYS Fluent for better gradient resolution and faster convergence around the cooling holes.AnalysisPathlines trace the cooling air through the blade's internal channels and out through the film holes, where it forms a thin thermal barrier over the surface. Film thickness varies along the blade — thickest near the holes — and the film is turbulent, mixing with the hot gas downstream and progressively losing effectiveness. The simulation makes the core design trade-off visible: hole size, shape, spacing, count, and injection angle all control how well the film holds before the hot gas entrains it, giving a clear basis for evaluating film cooling performance from temperature fields and pathline behavior.

DescriptionThis project investigates three-dimensional airflow within a cylindrical jet intake geometry using ANSYS Fluent, examining how intake design influences flow acceleration, pressure variation, and mass flow distribution — factors critical to aircraft engine inlet performance across various flight conditions.MethodologyThe three-dimensional geometry, featuring a variable cross-sectional area for flow conditioning, is built in ANSYS Design Modeler and meshed in ANSYS Meshing with 389,136 cells to capture flow transitions and boundary layer behavior accurately. The simulation runs as a steady-state case with the standard k-epsilon turbulence model, chosen for reliable prediction of confined internal flow. Air enters at a velocity inlet of 3.55 m/s, with a pressure outlet and no-slip wall conditions applied to the intake walls.AnalysisThe results show flow acceleration from an inlet velocity of 3.55 m/s to a maximum internal velocity of 3.6 m/s, driven by the reduction in cross-sectional area, along with a corresponding pressure rise to a maximum upstream value of 5.96 Pa as the flow is conditioned through the intake. The calculated mass flow rate of 0.02525548 kg/s confirms consistent flow delivery through the intake geometry. Streamline and velocity field visualization reveal flow acceleration zones and identify any regions of flow separation, while the pressure field highlights stagnation regions and recovery mechanisms along the flow path — together providing insight relevant to subsonic intake design, with implications extending to supersonic and engine integration considerations where intake performance directly affects overall propulsion system behavior.

DescriptionThis project simulates airflow over a dimpled rotating cylinder using ANSYS Fluent software. A cylindrical object is placed inside a rectangular channel. The airflow enters the channel at a horizontal velocity of 0.45 m/s and collides with the cylindrical body.The cylinder rotates about its central axis at an angular velocity of 20 radians per second (rad/s), so a moving wall must be defined. For this reason, the fluid simulation domain is divided into two parts: the rotating region, which contains the cylinder rotating at a constant angular velocity, and the surrounding fluid region, which is the interior of the rectangular channel outside the cylinder.The cylinder wall features dimples whose protruding side faces the inside of the cylinder and whose recessed side faces the outside. The aim of the study is to investigate the pressure distribution and the rotational phenomena around the rotating cylindrical wall, since the presence of dimples on the cylinder surface influences the behavior of the fluid.The geometry of the present model is three-dimensional and is designed using SOLIDWORKS software. The meshing is performed with ANSYS Meshing software. The mesh type is unstructured, and the number of elements is equal to 1,064,903.MethodologyA cylindrical wall is created in the form of an interface, that is, a common surface shared between two regions that allows the fluid to flow across its boundary. Around this wall, a dedicated flow region in the shape of a hollow cylinder is defined to represent the rotating cylinder. The Frame Motion (MRF) method is then used to simulate this inner cylindrical region, which rotates at the same angular velocity as the main cylinder.ConclusionAt the end of the solution process, contours of pressure, velocity, and turbulent kinetic energy are obtained. Using the MRF method, the cylinder can be assumed stationary while the surrounding airflow is treated as rotating at the same rotational speed of 20 rad/s around the central axis of the cylinder. The contours clearly show the velocity and pressure distributions within the domain.

DescriptionThis project simulates rotating helicopter rotor blades using the Mesh Motion technique in a transient formulation. A helicopter stays aloft by forcing a large mass of air downward through its rotating blades, generating an equal and opposite upward force — by aerodynamically shaping the blades and spinning them, the rotor raises the air pressure beneath the wing and creates lift. This project models that rotating rotor to quantify the net upward force, blade tip speed, and Tip Speed Ratio.MethodologyThe 3-D rotor and surrounding domain are designed in Design Modeler and meshed in ANSYS Meshing with roughly 937,677 elements. The Mesh Motion method is used to simulate continuous blade rotation at 1250 rpm about the Y-axis, requiring a transient solver to capture the rotating motion over time. The RNG k-ε turbulence model is applied to resolve the rotating flow field generated by the spinning blades.AnalysisPost-processing includes velocity, pressure, and turbulent viscosity contours along with streamlines, revealing the swirling air motion induced by the rotating blades. Key performance metrics extracted from the simulation include a pressure difference across the rotor of 5 Pa, a maximum domain air velocity of 2 m/s, and a blade tip velocity of 1.96 m/s. These results illustrate how the rotor generates the pressure difference responsible for lift, and establish Mesh Motion as a core technique applicable to any continuously rotating machinery analyzed in transient mode — helicopter rotors, propellers, wind turbines, and mixers alike.