A Study On The Interface Between Grasshopper And Fluent For Building Wind Environment Analysis

With the development of CFD technology, numerical simulation has extended to architecture and HVAC design.Today, wind environment has become an important part of building design,and the skill of using CFD simulation tools for wind environment analysis has become one of the architects necessary ability. However,the general CFD software is hard to use for architects.The modeling function is the shortcut of them whitch was designed to be using at engineering area.ln addition, architects frequently used modeling software such as Rhino, Sketchup etc. which does not provide direct CFD software interface.These factors have become the barriers to use CFD technology analysis and design of architects.With the development of parametric design method,architects are more likely to use parametric tools such as Rhino and Grasshopper to optimization design.If it is possible to combine the parmatric capabilities of Grasshopper with the simulation technology of fluent,it will be able to help architects to design the building wind environment more efficiently.In this paper,author select Ansys Fluent as simulation tool and select Rhino+Grasshopper as the parametric platform to design an interface to connect from Grasshopper to Fluent. First of all,author introduced the plug-in development processes of Grasshopper and described the internal data structures and the key technical details of secondary development of Grasshopper with a simple example component. Secondly,author showed the script development of the pre-processing software ICEM CFD and the solver software Fluent. Based on preliminary basic research,the author completed the linked interface plug-in between grasshopper and fluent.The interface provide three mode of unstructured mesh generation and the batch and singleton mode which determine the run mode of fluent.There were other functions the interface has provided,such as thread synchronization, data calculation, image export and so on.Finally,author used two demonstration experiment on outdoor building wind environment simulation and interior wind environment simulation to show some tricks in using the interface and also show how to use genetic algorithm to optimize the design with the CFD interface.The article introduces the implementation process of the interface between grasshopper and fluent.And using two demonstration experiment to show the using method which intended to make it easy for readers and researchers to use CFD tools in the design of the plug and research work,and provide a feasible method for architects to use CFD tools in building wind environment simulations. The whole thesis contains about 52000 words,154pictures and charts.