M-M-M-Meshing....

[greenpower dude reloaded]

OK, I've got hold of fluent and i've got a way of outputing decent VRML's STL's etc etc problem is im really struggling with meshing, how and where do I found some software(freeware would be nice)that will work with Fluent 6.3.26??

I've tried Gmsh but that doesn't seem to do anything at all really and outputs 0bytes files?

[kilcoo316]

The two I've used with Fluent in the past are Gambit (shite) and ICEM (not too bad)...

Both are commerical.


If you've fluent, I imagine you can acquire ICEM from the same.

[riff_raff]

GPDR,

The aero guys I work with recommend Gambit. We do the CAD lofting in CATIA V5 and export the data in an IGES format. But invariably the mesh must still be cleaned up in Gambit. The biggest problem seems to be the way Gambit creates mesh nodal points along the boundaries between adjacent surfaces in the IGES data. It seems that it's a case of the fewer surfaces the better, when you try to mesh a set of IGES surfaces in Gambit.

And depending on the resolution of your mesh, you definitely want to make sure that you eliminate any small pieces of surface from the source data that are less than the mesh size you will be using. Otherwise, you will have to fix those mesh holes in Gambit, which can be tedious.

So before you export your surface data to Gambit, make sure that you do as much as possible to join or simply the number of surfaces in the CAD source model. The best meshing results will be produced by surface data that has common boundaries and corner points between adjacent surfaces.

Good luck,
Terry

[noname]

in UG there is an export option named "heal". as an output you are getting geometry in UG format with some features (like very small areas, etc.) removed. it helps a little bit but does not remove the problem completely so you will have to do some work on your own. I do not know if such an option exists in CATIA, due the limited number of licenses we are using step as a format to move geometry from CAD to FEM. I know ANSYS ICEM/CFD is now integrated with ProE but as I am not using ProE I can not say anything more.

ANSYS invested recently in meshers a lot and I have to admit they made a step forward. their Workbench works with the various geometry formats much better than it was the case in the past.

I can also recommend Hypermesh as pre-processor. its capabilities are really impressive.

the problem is those tools, as most of the CAE software, are quite expensive.

you can also create your own mesher(s). it takes time, it will not be as fast and efficient as the professional tools (I checked this on my own somewhere in the past ) but it will give you much better understanding of the tool, the math behind it, its strong and weak points and thus will make you a much better engineer.

regards

[ReubenG]

If you are looking for free / open source meshing tools, a colleague recommended the following:
CUBIT (originally developed by Sandia labs) is ok for meshing. You will probably need a post processor, so try Paraview. Be warned - these are open source codes that are developed by/ intended for use in in research / academia so they assume a pretty high level of understanding of the underlying theory.
I haven't used either of the above.


I have very, very briefly looked at LS-PrePost (free front end for LS_DYNA) - I hated the interface. I know it can generate FE meshes from IGES data - not sure if this will help you for CFD meshes.

[noname]

sorry, I clicked "quote" instead of "edit"