ESI Group CFD Portal - Laminar Flow Past a Backward Facing Step

Incompressible subsonic flow past a two-dimensional backward-facing step is modeled to estimate the laminar reattachment length (i.e., the point where the separation bubble disappears on the channel floor behind the step). This is a step-by-step guided introductory tutorial for setting up a flow model in CFD-ACE+.

Details

This tutorial introduces the user to the flow module in CFD-ACE+ and discusses the following model setup topics in detail:

Importing a grid file into CFD-ACE.
Setting model properties.
Setting problem type.
Setting volume/boundary/initial conditions.
Setting solver control properties.
Requesting printed and graphical output.
Submitting model to obtain a solution.
Checking for solution convergence.

Comments

If you have never used CFD-ACE+ or any other CFD tools, this is a good place to start. The backward-facing step is a canonical problem widely used as a validation test case to compare CFD code predictions with experiments in subsonic and especially in the supersonic flow regimes.