Fluid-structure interaction simulation utilising MpCCI

The goal of this study was to demonstrate two-way fluid-structure interaction (FSI) cosimulation utilising MpCCI. Two-way FSI co-simulation with Fluent CFD-code and Abaqus structural FE-code utilizing MpCCI was applied successfully. In an FSI simulation, a structure deforms due to forces caused by a fluid flow while the deformation changes the fluids boundary. So called weak coupling was used which means that each problem is solved separately and during each time step some variables are exchanged and inserted into the equations of the other problem (pressure and nodal position in this case). Example structure in this case study was a rotating propeller and a non-rotating cylinder located at the wake of the propeller. The cylinder represents for example the body of the azimuthing thruster. The pressure and velocity fields obtained seemed to be reasonable. It was found that most dominating component of axial displacements of the propeller is the blade frequency. This is caused by the cylinder structure located at the wake of the propeller. For transversal and vertical displacements of the hub the dominating component is rotating frequency. The goal of this study was to demonstrate two-way FSI co-simulation utilising MpCCI, and therefore the CFD-model was not optimized for propeller calculations. In the future work, the results obtained should be compared with results with one-way co-simulation in order to find out impact of two-way coupling for this type of problems. Also computing times could be compared between these simulations.