Dear CFD users,

Just needed your opinion on which one you would prefer to use for meshing purposes and why? Gambit or ICEM CFD.

Thanks in advance.

Alan

i, for my purposes chose gambit, simply because its easy to work with, and with gambit i can finish my work in almost no time. it depends from person to person i guess.

ICEM supports many file formats

It kind of depends on what you are aiming to do. If you are after "structured" style hex meshes, which most people prefer for aerodynamic type flows, Icem is a better option, but it is a big additional expense. Gambit is generally included with Fluent, so it doesn't cost extra. Gambit has one outstanding trick, which is the Cooper mesh. Both programs will make you tear your hair out, unless you are doing something simple. Icem has the great advantage of exporting to virtually every imagineable solver. If money is no problem, get Icem. Failing that, Gambit can certainly do the job, but you will probably have to look closely at block decomposition and either mapped or Cooper meshes.

yes cooper is great thing, it once happened that my boss boasted they can create the 'same' mesh in 1 hour with hypermesh, well they started 10 am in morning, and evening 5pm they were grapling with the software and no success. Gambit has its good features and others also have theirs, it all depends upon what you want to do and with what you feel about the software.

If I could recommend something, that would be Gridgen. I find it great, especially when it comes to complex geometries. I meshed some geometries I would not even attempt to with Gambit.

If you plan to mesh from dirty or complicated cad geometry my experience is that Icem is superior. Remember that gambit will look a Fluent license, so if you want to be able to mesh while running simulations, you'll need a extra Fluent-license, and then Icem is not more expensive.

I have worked with both ICEM and GAMBIT and I find ICEM the superior of the two. It as faster and a lot more stable when considering tet-meshes. For instance in ICEM, you don't need to have a volume, it can just be a collection of surfaces and as long the gaps between the surfaces are smaller than the cell sizes, a mesh is easily created. For GAMBIT to come up with a mesh you have to created one (or several) volumes. And the volumes are not created unles you have removed all the cracks. This could be a quite time consuming proces. Gambit comes together with the Fluent package, and Icem comes together with the CFX package.