(Some) Best Practices

[Daniel E.]

Over the course of several months I have come to use this solver for a variety of aircraft problems. Here is a coallated list of best practices I have come to rely on. Hope this is useful to others just starting off. Please feel free to add to this thread if you find your own. 

- Meshing wings and rotors should be such that you have about 40 cells in the chordwise direction on each side of the airfoil. Spanwise cells should be such that the largest cell aspect ratio is about 2:1 or 3:1

- If you have a symmetric model, it is best to mirror or copy the mesh in FlightStream rather than bringing in the full model. This is more likely to ensure numerical symmetry. 

- Remember to check mesh surface normals before solving! Green is out!

- From a thick body rotor/wing, median curves can be generated and a lofted surface can be used to generate a thin surface representation without loss of generality. 

- For a rotor in hover case, "Mesh Induced Velocity" option in Advanced Settings can be toggled and may have better success than using the "Motion is Rotor" option (in Euclidean Motion window).