Combined CFD and FEA analysis?

[jrh43]

I am experimenting with a wing design in Inventor and Simulation CFD.  I have successfully designed the wing shape, opened with SimCFD, and setup and ran analyses. Using the Wall Calculator, I can find the aerodynamic forces acting on the wing -- although so far the only way I've found to see the force distribution is to split the wing surface into many small segments manually in Inventor, and even then there is not a particularly elegant way of viewing the forces.

My question is, is there an automated way of connecting the CFD aerodynamic forces results back to Inventor or Simulation Mechanical, such that the deflection of the wing structure could be simulated? Ideally, this could be an automated iterative process, with the new "deflected model" going back for further CFD analysis -- the iteration would either reach a steady state deflection, or fail to converge indicating flutter or aeroelastic divervence / structural failure.  Right now the only way I can think to do this is manually gridding the wing surface, running CFD to find the forces, then manually entering those forces into the FEA analysis, and performing iterations manually -- all of which sounds very painstakingly inefficient.

Thanks!

[Jon.Wilde]

Hi 

You can export the wall results into Sim Mechanical, although there is no loop-back process, the optimisation would need to be a manually iterative process.

Thanks,

Jon