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+1 to this - Though it has been many years, at one point I helped write CFD code for the US Navy. The disconnect between real-world measurements and simulations
by pge 3y ago
+1 to this - Though it has been many years, at one point I helped write CFD code for the US Navy. The disconnect between real-world measurements and simulations was vast for any structure remotely complicated (ie anything but an axially symmetric simple shape like a torpedo). While the CFD code has gotten way better (largely via Moore's law), I expect propellers are still quite hard to simulate, and your best path is to build a model and see how it performs.
- Nanana909 3y agoBut the CFD isn't to replace building the model...it's to give you a head start and reasonable starting location, and to find glaring errors. Otherwise you're going to be spending thousands and thousands running back to the wind tunnel every time you want to iterate..
- pge 3y agoAgreed, and that is exactly how we used it with the Navy - the CFD simulations narrowed the universe of options so we could be more efficient with the wind tunnels and water tanks. In this case, however, he has a specific shape that he wants to test. For that, going straight to a physical model makes sense.