Thermal FSI Concepts

Thermal FSI Concepts

In this training video, we describe the Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) concepts, focusing on Thermal FSI in ANSYS software. We provide you with a detailed and comprehensive tutorial to help you master all concepts of the FSI without any issues.

Whenever a fluid flow reaches a solid body, it exerts a pressure load on the structure, which can lead to deformation of the structure or displacement of its boundaries. Hence, studying the interaction between the fluid and the solid is important. In addition, if thermal loads are significant on the structure deformation, thermal FSI analysis will be of interest.

For thermal FSI simulations, two methodologies are proposed:

• Intrinsic FSI
• External FSI

According to Intrinsic FSI, all calculations, such as flow in the fluid domain and structure in the solid domain, are carried out in the ANSYS Fluent solver. For this purpose, the Structure model is used, which has these options:

• Linear / Nonlinear Elasticity
• Thermal Effect

In the intrinsic FSI approach, we focused on the thermoelasticity analysis based on the effect of thermal loads on structures. Therefore, we described the thermoelastic governing equations completely.

However, according to the external FSI, fluid and structural computations are performed by separate solvers in the ANSYS Workbench software environment. The Fluent solver is used for fluid flow, and different Structural and Thermal solvers are used for solid analysis.

For this purpose, Data Transfer must be defined, which is possible in two general ways:

• Directly coupled between the solutions of the fluid and solid solvers
• Indirectly through the System Coupling