Designing a Solar Boat Wing Using Ansys Fluent

Challenges

Our team needed software that was capable of simulating water and airflow simultaneously while calculating forces acting on the hull and wing. Due to its ease of use and multiphase flow capabilities, we chose to use Ansys Fluent to help design and optimize the boat wing.

Engineering Solution

• Ansys SpaceClaim was used to simplify the geometry of the wing and the boat to reduce computational capacity required.
• The Combine feature of SpaceClaim was used to create the required flow field.
• The flow field was meshed in Ansys software using tetra elements.
• In the setup, the mesh was transformed into a polyhedral mesh, which reduces the number of elements and decreases convergence time.
• Multiphase flow behaviors were applied to properly simulate the boat’s environment.
• The inbuilt drag and lift calculator was used to determine the forces acting on the boat.

Benefits

Ansys’ simulation software gave us the tools needed to test our designs in a virtual environment. This helped our team rule out less effective models, resulting in saved time and money. Our team also had no experience prior to joining the team in designing a hydrofoil boat. Comparing our calculations with Ansys results gave us confidence in our design before real-world testing.

Additionally, being able to use the same simulation software used in industry was great exeperience for our team. We now possess simulation skills that can be used in our future engineering careers.