Turbomachinery model and ALE coupling

[bstorti]

Hello,

We are working in AWE (Airborne Wind Energy) systems CFD modeling.
To this purpose, we are computing the aerodynamic forces on a KITE power system model.

We are already controlling the rotations velocities and angular displacements with the turbomachinery model. The rotations and the angular velocities are imposed using quaternions through user subroutines, and the interfaces between the rotational mesh and the fixed mesh are solved using the Full Transient Turbomachinery model.

Since the object, for our case, does not only rotate but also have large translations, in order to take into account those displacements to improve our model, our question is:

- Is there a way to couple the turbomachinery model with the ALE module? Is it straightforward or requires a lot of code re-writing/modification?

Note: The rotational domain is a sphere with the Kite inside. Our goal is to impose the Kite translations at the sphere so as the rotational domain moves as a rigid body and only the elements of the fixed mesh are allowed to deform.

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,

Bruno and Julian

[Yvan Fournier]

Hello,

I have not looked into this in detail, but I guess that if we can "fix" the mesh deformation to 0 along the rotor/stator interfaces (and inside the rotor in your case), the 2 options could be made compatible. Since the turbomachinery module changes the vertex connectivity at each time step, there would also be an issue of interpolating vertex coordinates back from one mesh to another, but this is probably not too hard (I could try to help with this).

Best regards,

Yvan