Tecplot has a great case-study from Continuum Dynamics about their use of Tecplot360 to create a ship air-wake database to be used in helping Helicopters landing on ships. Using TecPlot not only for its CFD capabilities but it’s visualization support as well, they have a few great paragraphs towards the bottom about their analysis procedures.
Tecplot 360 allowed CDI to graphically render the data for better analysis, as well as to check and double-check data, especially for previously-undetectable data. For example, CDI uses Tecplot 360 to measure tip vortices, rendered visually as an intertwined blue helix.
“I could extract data for each one of those vortices, such as the distance beneath the rotor, so I could compare it to experimental data,” said Whitehouse. “You can also see the vortex pairing, which was not something that had been predicted with CFD for a hovering helicopter before this point. You start to see new physics that have been observed experimentally, but that people maybe have had difficulty predicting.”
