CONSELF | Aerodynamic forces and torques calculation
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# Aerodynamic forces and torques calculation

## 10 Mar Aerodynamic forces and torques calculation

After we finished our simulations, most of the times, we are not interested in flow velocities and pressure but rather on forces and torques the flow is actually applying to our solid structures. CONSELF provides you a set of results from which it is straight-forward the calculation of these derived quantities, also thanks to our integration with PARAVIEW.

But let’s start from scratch: PARAVIEW is a free software that represent a real standard in data analysis. Completely free and opensource, it’s very popular in academia and research. With its features it is possible to manipulate output data coming from CFD and FEM analysis in an easy and quick way. Obviously a complete management of its capabilities and possibilities requires a little effort from the user. This is the reason that pushed us into creating a series of tutorials and video dedicated to data processing.

Before going to the video let’s just remember us few little things. In aerodynamics there are two different terms that generates a force:

$F = \underbrace{p \cdot \mathbf{A}}_\text{pressure component} + \underbrace{\mu \cfrac{\partial u}{\partial n}}_\text{viscous component}$

These two terms are generally due to the local pressure and the local velocity gradients. In most cases, one of the two is predominant to the other, depending on Reynolds number and body geometry, for this reason in most analytical calculation you just calculate one of the two terms.

Once the forces have been calculated, torques are straight forward to use:

$T = F \times ( \mathbf{P} - \mathbf{O} )$

where P and O represent the force application point and the origin of our reference system. Keeping in mind this, we can now have a better understanding to most of the operations mentioned during the video!