[Bldg-sim] CFD Analysis

Shishir Gupta shishir at mechartes.com
Fri Feb 27 23:52:26 PST 2009


Carney,

I'm also among the group of people who are not too comfortable with CFD
results from tools like IES-VE and Designbuilder. These are primarily energy
modeling tools with built in CFD applications. However they provide a
seamless environment (for Energy modeling and CFD) and have easy to
understand user interface but I feel the main problem is with 'automatic
meshing' that these software offer. Meshing is a critical component of the
CFD process and it would be hard to automatically generate right kind of
mesh for infinite variations of geometry and operating conditions.

To obtain correct CFD results we must check mesh convergence, may be these
tools have algorithm which create very fine mesh to start with and hence
they take a long time to produce results. Improving hardware capacity like
JRR and Zhoulum suggested is essential but its also critical to create right
kind of mesh to get quick results. This is especially critical for building
application since the volume of analysis zone is usually huge, if we mesh it
improperly then we can end up waiting for an year even on 32 machine cluster
or a powerful Xeon server.

In my opinion also stand alone CFD tools like Fluent, Phoenics, CFX, StarCD
etc. are much better CFD tools than IES-VE. Even if you would like to
use IES-VE it would be prudent to test a few cases of your analysis and
compare results with established stand alone CFD tools.

There are also CFD tools specific for building applications like
Fluent-Airpak and Flovent which are customized for building applications.
These tools are easy to understand for building engineers and produce good
results. Another good option can be OpenSource CFD libraries like OpenFoam,
FDS etc. However the problem there is that learning curve with OpenSource
platforms is rather slow.

Regards
Shishir

------------
www.mechartes.com




2009/2/27 CARNEY Ronan <Ronan.CARNEY at projectservices.qld.gov.au>

>
> Dear all,
>
> I am writing to you to ask for your personal preference on which CFD
> software package I should use for all the following (as one) and your reason
> why;
>
> A) Large Scale City Analysis of wind turbulence and velocity
> B) Internal and external analysis (combined)
> C) CFD for Urban Design.
>
> Currently we use IES-VE for CFD analysis but from what I've heard, the
> general consensus is that, it may not be near accurate enough. In addition,
> the computational time is far too long.
>
> *Regards,***
> *****Ronan Carney***
> Electrical Engineer
> ***Project Services*
> * Level 5B 80 George St Brisbane
> ( Ph: (07) 3224 5983
> 2 Fax: (07) 3224 6151
> ,Email:*** **Ronan.Carney at projectservices.qld.gov.au***<Ronan.Carney at projectservices.qld.gov.au>
> **
> [image: Picture (Metafile)]****
> “*Queensland celebrates its 150th birthday throughout 2009.*
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