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COMSOL CFD Capability
Posted May 26, 2020, 10:03 a.m. EDT Fluid & Heat, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) 1 Reply
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Hi, my name is Julia and I am currently an undergraduate Mechanical Engineering student at Georgia Southern University. I am working on a project that requires complex FSI simulations and I am looking for guidance if COMSOL is capable of such a task or if someone could point me in the right direction to a software capable of what I need.
The issue at hand involves two parallel plates with a compressible flow between them. The top plate is flexible while the bottom one is fixed. I would expect the top plate to bend downward and touch the bottom one at some point. Do you know any software that could do collision detection in such a case?
Thank you for your time, Julia
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Hello Julia,
COMSOL can certainly be used for FSI, but the topological change that occurs when our two plates get in contact makes things more complicated. One approach to consider is to keep the plates from actually touching by choosing an expression for the fluid's viscosity that makes it become extremely high when the distance between the two gets very small. This will stop the flow without the plates actually touching. To achieve this effect you would use the wall distance interface. See my post in this thread for more details.
Best regards,
Jeff
-------------------Jeff Hiller