[phandy]

I'm trying to figure out how to take models from my cad suite (autodesk inventor), and use snappyhexmesh (or any other native openfoam mesher) for pre-processing.

Now, it was my understanding that for flows with an inlet and outlet, that I would need separate stl files as those surfaces. However, Inventor doesn't explicitly allow the exporting of surfaces to *.stl. Do I need to have just the inlet/outlet/wall surfaces to export, or can I make volumes?

If I need to have surfaces only, it looks like I'll need to export the surfaces as STEP, and use a different program to generate STL files for use with snappyhexmesh, which isn't an especially enticing option.

Also, do I need the whole volume of the flow channel as its own STL for snappyhexmesh? And how do I check if my stl is watertight?

Any help here is very appreciated.

Edit: from this page http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...e-stlfile.html, it appears that if I can export a single solid stl with separate regions, then perhaps I can do this without exporting surfaces to stl. Am I right?

[dybuk]

Yes, you are right

In geometry definition:

surface_with_regions.stl
    {
        type triSurfaceMesh;
        name  surface_with_regions;
        regions
        {
			region_1	{name  region_1;}
			region_2    {name   region_2;}
                        

	}

And in refinementSurfaces

surface_with_regions
   {
        level (1 2); //global refinement settings for surface
        regions
        {
        region_1
        {
            level (5 6);        // local refinement
            patchInfo
            {
                type wall;
            }
        }
        region_2
        {
            level (5 7);        // local refinement
            patchInfo
            {
                type patch;
            }
          }
          
    }