Development of a Virtual Wind Tunnel

Researchers working in computational modelling can benefit a lot from coupling their code with a well established professional code, particularly when it is of a complementary discipline. However, this coupling is very difficult typically due to lack of a suitable interface or lack of detailed documentation of the commercial software. In this paper the computational fluid-structure interaction process of coupling a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) research code Parmod and the commercial code NX NASTRAN for finite element methods (FEM) is introduced and displayed with details. The main components of this coupling include the corresponding DMAP modifications to NX NASTRAN, the mesh morphing procedure and the Python script for the engine of the coupling all of these above. An example is shown in details to demonstrate the process. We found that the presented coupling process works very effectively making possible the cooperation of a CFD research code running on CPU clusters and GPUs as well and the commercial structural analysis code NX NASTRAN. In the future strong coupling will be done, too.