STAR-CCM+ Tutorial | Extrenal Flow Airbus320 | Part 6 – Vorticity Visualization | Advanced

In this STAR-CCM+ tutorial, we simulate the external aerodynamics around an Airbus A320 aircraft and walk through the complete workflow from geometry preparation to post-processing. This step-by-step guide shows how to set up the flow domain, apply boundary conditions, generate a high-quality mesh, and visualize aerodynamic performance.

🔹 What you’ll learn
0:00 Introduction and case overview
0:XX Importing and preparing the Airbus A320 geometry
0:XX Creating the external flow domain
0:XX Surface and volume meshing strategy for aircraft aerodynamics
0:XX Physics models, turbulence setup, and boundary conditions
0:XX Running the simulation and monitoring convergence
0:XX Post-processing pressure, velocity fields, lift, and drag

📂 Case details
– Software: Simcenter STAR-CCM+
– Topic: External aerodynamics of an Airbus A320
– Focus: Geometry preparation, meshing, turbulence modeling, aerodynamic coefficients
– Output: Pressure distribution, surface flow, wake structure, lift and drag trends

🎓 About this series – Abecator CFD
This tutorial is part of the STAR-CCM+ learning series on the Abecator CFD channel.
The series is designed to help students, researchers, and engineers learn practical CFD skills using real aerospace and engineering examples.

👍 Support the channel
– Like the video if it helped you
– Subscribe to *Abecator CFD* for more STAR-CCM+ and CFD tutorials
– Comment what you want to see next (airfoil analysis, CHT, multiphase, rotating machinery, etc.)

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🎓 About this series – Abecator CFD
This video is part of my STAR-CCM+ tutorial series on the Abecator CFD channel.
The goal is to make industrial CFD examples (like gearbox lubrication, external aerodynamics, and heat transfer) easy to follow for students, researchers, and engineers.

👍 Support the channel
– Like the video if it helped you
– Subscribe to *Abecator CFD* for more STAR-CCM+ and CFD tutorials
– Comment what you want next (more multiphase, SPH, rotating machinery, etc.)

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Up to this point in our exercise, we’ve focused mainly on **mesh generation**.
We created **two volumetric controls**:

One *large volumetric control* that surrounds most of the aircraft, and
One *cylindrical volumetric control* designed specifically to capture the flow around the **winglet**.

Our solution so far has been **laminar**, and we already advanced it a bit in previous steps.
Now I’ll *run the solver again* so the solution can progress further on this refined mesh.

I go to the **residuals plot**.
Because we changed the mesh, the residuals first show a **small initial peak**, which is normal. After that, as the equations start iterating on the new mesh, the residuals drop again and the solution begins to **reconverge**.

For a geometry like this, a reasonable target for the residuals is usually around **10⁻³**.
In more *industrial applications**, especially with more complex setups, we sometimes accept higher residuals for certain equations – for example, for continuity we might accept values around **10⁻²* or even **5×10⁻²**, depending on the constraints and time we have.