[clarice]

I am doing CFD of an airfoil. I want a quad inflation layer on the surface, with tetra elements in the free mesh as I want to eventually convert the tetra mesh to a polyhedral mesh in Fluent. The sweep method is ideal for this and the only way to easily achieve such a mesh (that I know of).

I apply inflation on the airfoil edge of the face which is the source of the sweep, and I specify a first layer height for it. The mesh generates without a problem, but when I open it in Fluent, I found that the first layer of the inflation layer is not consistent. It is the specified value on the source and target faces of the sweep, however, immediately after the faces toward the center of the span, the first layer height is bigger than specified. This does not happen along the entire chord. I have tried varying the global size controls and limits, the local face and edge sizings surrounding the airfoil, as well as fixing the first layer height in the advanced inflation settings and constraining the boundary, but nothing has solved the problem. When I try another mesh method, the inflation is consistent, so I know the uneven first layer height is not due to my geometry. No other method can give me a quad inflation mesh with tetra surrounding mesh, so I would really like to get to the bottom of why a simple meshing method such as the sweep mesh fails for my simple geometry.

Has anyone ever experienced such a problem with sweep meshing before, and how can I circumvent it?