I have a model that I am meshing in ICEM. The previous experiment with the same model had a bit over 2 million nodes and had decent quality. I made some very very slight changes and used the ICEM in workbench ('advanced meshing' option) and it gave me a mesh of over 22 million nodes with horrendous mesh quality.

In researching this, I put the same model into the plain old ICEMCFD outside of WB (straight from desktop) and put in the SAME values. This time, the mesh came out to be a little short of 2 million with a very good mesh quality. This is on par with the older model.

So, my question is: why would ICEM be so different in WB rather than just running on its own?

It might have to do with the geometry translation - inside WB it typically uses the WB translators and outside WB it uses the old ICEM translators by default.

Try importing the geom using the WB translators when working with old ICEM - I think you can do this at 11.0. I do not have access to ICEM anymore, so cannot tell you the menu path.

That's pretty much what I did. I had the model setup in the Design Modeler and I imported it over to the desktop ICEM using the WB translator. Thanks!

-W

It's quite possible that the units are different in WB vs ICEM stand-alone. Check some dimensions to make sure the models are the same size in both instances. Depending on the CAD format - the readers can do different things with scale factors.

Good point. I took a look in CFX to make sure the scale/dimensions were as created in Inventor. Both models are good in CFX but I'll examine the ICEM models to make sure. thanks! -W