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Hi,
I’m pretty new to the CFD game, but have been trying to model, very approximately, fluid flow through a field of undersea turbine generators. The issue I’m having is how to actually approximate the restriction which corresponds to the turbine blades.
I’m using COMSOL/FEMLAB. As far as I know, all it does is solves the Navier Stokes equation for the conditions of your problem. For this reason, initially I just made the turbines correspond to a region of increased viscosity, but now I’ve realized this isn’t a good approximation at all since the turbines are actually energy sinks.
Some people I’ve spoken to say approximating just a resistive force or similar should be fine, but as I see it, the flow will be very different depending of whether the fluid is simply being restricted at certain points or energy is actually being extracted from it…
What do you think? Are there any FEMLAB experts out there? How can I get around this?
Thanks,
Tim
I’m pretty new to the CFD game, but have been trying to model, very approximately, fluid flow through a field of undersea turbine generators. The issue I’m having is how to actually approximate the restriction which corresponds to the turbine blades.
I’m using COMSOL/FEMLAB. As far as I know, all it does is solves the Navier Stokes equation for the conditions of your problem. For this reason, initially I just made the turbines correspond to a region of increased viscosity, but now I’ve realized this isn’t a good approximation at all since the turbines are actually energy sinks.
Some people I’ve spoken to say approximating just a resistive force or similar should be fine, but as I see it, the flow will be very different depending of whether the fluid is simply being restricted at certain points or energy is actually being extracted from it…
What do you think? Are there any FEMLAB experts out there? How can I get around this?
Thanks,
Tim