This tutorial shows you how to run a hole plate CFD simulation using ANSYS Fluent! Wind tunnel testing with perforated plates is super important for many engineering projects, but actual tests can be expensive. Using CFD simulation of hole plates, you can see all the details of airflow through perforated plates right on your computer! This guide walks you through setting up a complete wind tunnel CFD model with a hole plate inside it. You’ll learn how to measure pressure drop across perforated plates and see detailed flow patterns that would be hard to see in real tests. Hole plate simulations help engineers design better filters, heat exchangers, acoustic panels, and many other things. We’ll show how computational fluid dynamics can predict important things like drag coefficient and pressure loss for different hole plate designs. Even if you’re new to CFD modeling, our step-by-step approach makes it easy to understand perforation effects on airflow and get reliable results comparable to actual wind tunnel testing.

Simulation Process

We created our model of a flat plate with a central hole and placed it inside a virtual wind tunnel. For the mesh, we used ICEM CFD to build a structured grid, which gives more accurate results than unstructured meshes for this type of flow problem. We made the mesh much denser near the plate, especially in regions before and after it, to capture important flow features like boundary layers and wake effects. After building the mesh, we imported it into ANSYS Fluent and set up appropriate boundary conditions to model realistic wind tunnel conditions.

Figure 1: Structured grid performed by ICEM

Post-processing

The pressure contour reveals the classic pressure distribution pattern around an obstacle in flow, with high pressure (red, ~7.1 Pa) on the upstream face where air impacts the plate and significant negative pressure (blue, ~-14.8 Pa) immediately behind it. This pressure difference creates the drag force experienced by the plate. Most interestingly, the pressure at the hole edges drops dramatically as flow accelerates through the restriction – a perfect example of Bernoulli’s principle in action. The velocity plots (Figures 2 and 3) complement this analysis by showing intense flow acceleration through the hole (reaching ~4.2 m/s, nearly double the freestream velocity) and the complex wake structure downstream. The streamlines in Figure 3 expose the three-dimensional nature of the flow, with multiple recirculation zones forming behind the plate. These counter-rotating vortices trap slow-moving fluid, extending the low-pressure wake region significantly downstream before flow reattachment occurs.

Figure 2: Pressure & velocity distribution around the hole in the plate

From an engineering perspective, these results have important practical implications. The substantial pressure drop across the plate and the size of the wake region directly impact energy losses in systems using perforated plates. By quantifying these effects, engineers can optimize hole size, shape, and pattern to balance between necessary flow restriction and minimizing pressure losses. The streamline visualization reveals how flow through the hole interacts with the wake, creating periodic vortex shedding that could potentially cause vibration and noise problems in real applications. This simulation method provides valuable insight for designing acoustic baffles, heat exchangers, and filtration systems where understanding the trade-off between flow resistance and pressure recovery is critical.

Figure 3: Streamline visualization