OpenVSP to Fluent

[Ryan Powell]

TL;DR: Trying to export CFD mesh directly from OpenVSP to Fluent with far field mesh without remeshing in NetGen, Gmsh, etc.

I’m a senior aerospace engineering student with a CIS minor. Recently I was introduced to OpenVSP and have been trying to figure out the best way to use it in our capstone project.

I was able to use the FEA Mesh function in VSP to export a mesh in *NASTRAN.dat that was able to be directly imported into Ansys Workbench for static structural analysis.

Now I want to use the CFD Mesh function in VSP to export to Fluent in a similar way. By exporting the CFD Mesh as .stl, the geometry can be imported into workbench. A mesh can then be generated for the geometry and sent to Fluent. However, I would like to eliminate this step and import the mesh directly to Fluent.

Every time I try to load a mesh file format from VSP directly to Fluent it fails. I partially got around this by exporting mesh from VSP to NetGen, which can then export in the Fluent .msh format. This only works for CFD Mesh from VSP that is exported without intersecting geometry, without far field, without half mesh, and without wake. Really this defeats the point of what I want to accomplish bc it eliminates the convenience of going from VSP to Fluent. If I have to remesh in NetGen, I might as well just mesh in Fluent. Additionally, you can not take advantage of the automatic far field and wake meshes that VSP will generate for you. As of now you would have to recreate the far field in Fluent.

If anyone has any experience here, or ideas, please let me know! I encourage any general tips on how to quickly iterate first-cut vehicle design as this is really my goal, to improve workflow efficiency.