[Evil Teyen]

Hi all- I am trying to mesh a system of ducts (16mm x 1.4mm cross section) wrapped around a hot power source (250x250x370mm) in ICEM for use in Fluent. Numerous issues, this code is horrible- I even emailed ANSYS to tell them so and a man phoned me to say it was maybe "too high end" for what I was doing. Anyway. To the problems:

Firstly the auto-meshing option kept making an atrocious mess regardless of the settings, so after wasting a week I discovered the manual mesh building tools. I am now trying to build a single length/corner piece of ducting- it exports fine, but it causes FLUENT to throw an "ACCESS_VIOLATION" error on import. If I try to run the mesh checker it finds a variety of uncovered faces in both fluid and solid parts of the mesh, so I can't just add them arbitrarily to a new part with a defined boundary condition, but FLUENT seems to fix these before it crashes anyway- it also thinks that certain volume elements are incorrectly oriented (how I have no idea, as it created them itself- surely it should have known not to mis-orient them?) and if I click "fix" it bends them all out of shape, thus ruining the mesh. What can I do, beyond just cutting my losses (2 weeks of a ten week project so far) and re-starting in another meshing tool?

Cheers.

[diamondx]

relax... can you share pictures, icem files ?

[Far]

Originally Posted by Evil Teyen

Hi all- I am trying to mesh a system of ducts (16mm x 1.4mm cross section) wrapped around a hot power source (250x250x370mm) in ICEM for use in Fluent. Numerous issues, this code is horrible- I even emailed ANSYS to tell them so and a man phoned me to say it was maybe "too high end" for what I was doing.

I can understand ur feelings. Can you share some details so that we can help you out.

[Evil Teyen]

Many thanks for the encouragement all! I do have images and ICEM files, however I have now re-started in Design Modeller. I have ten sub-channels in each duct:
selecting....jpg
and at least one length / bend will mesh in DM:
nigh on perfect.jpg
however, of the geometry for one complete loop (of 24 I shall eventually need):
finally a loop that works...jpg
only one channel will mesh:
10% not rubbish.jpg
and, besides telling me I have misoriented faces on the other 9 channels, which were created in exactly the same fashion as the one which will mesh (via the successive boolean union of subsections), I just got this phenomenally useful error message from MS visual C++:
error..png
which is fairly amusing in itself..

Update: managed to get the whole loop to mesh, about to run a sim on it

[Evil Teyen]

Originally Posted by diamondx

relax... can you share pictures, icem files ?

Fluid channels:
looks ok 1.jpg
in solid duct:
looks ok 2.jpg
and the former after corruption by ICEM:
ruined volume orientations..jpg.

I may yet have to go back to ICEM to build a manifold the geometry for which I can't currently see a way to creating in DM.