[Bil]

Hi everyone,

I am working on a stirred tank model with two rushton blade impellers and four baffles. I created a tetrahedral mesh, following the steps from this post Baffle (zero thickness) wall.

I would like to create a full hexahedral mesh in order to facilitate convergence and compare the results with the tetrahedral mesh. The end result should be similar to the mesh found in e.g. (Haringa et al., 2017). The steps I followed are:

1) Cut the geometry according to MRF model - Meshing and Interface set-up

2) Apply the sweep method to each of the new volumes.

The problem I encounter is that the Meshing tool doesn't apply the Sweep Method, due to the zero thickness blades and baffles (Sweep Method Active: No, Solid Contains Non-Manifold Face).

If I set the "Share Topology" of the components that include the blades and baffles to "Group" a full hex mesh is generated, but Fluent does not recognize the blades and baffles, i.e. I cannot set boundary conditions.

My question is: I there a way to create hexahedral mesh in a mixing tank geometry with 2D internals in the ANSYS Meshing tool or this task can only be done in ICEM CFD? Any tip is greatly appreciated!

For reference I attach screenshots of the two meshes for a simple geometry with one 2D baffle. The geometry was created in SpaceClaim.

Best,
Bill