Unsteady Turbomachinery Flow Simulation With Unstructured Grids Using ANSYS Fluent

In the realm of CFD, simulations can be very time consuming and the ability to obtain a solution quickly to a given problem is extremely valuable. Specialized solvers that use structured grids often have a lot of time spent in preprocessing to generate a grid if the geometry is relatively complex. Alternative software exists that makes use of unstructured grids, but often are general solvers and may not be able to obtain as accurate of a solution. In an attempt to see how well an unstructured alternative solver would compare to a structured specialized solver, a verified solution taken from the structured MSU-TURBO turbomachinery code was duplicated in ANSYS Fluent with an unstructured grid. Despite some limitations with ANSYS Fluent's turbomachinery setup, a close, but not exact, solution was obtained and compared to the MSU-TURBO solution.