[fanta]

Good Morning,
i am trying to make the simulation workflow easier and to save money for the company.
It all got started with introducing Siemens NX instead of Solidworks as the main CAD programm for the machines we are developing. With Siemens NX one can easily export multi-region STL files for a given watertight CAD design (before that we were using Solidworks, multi-region STL Files were not possible + overall CAD and STL quality was tpoor, too). So with Solidworks as CAD system we meshed with Ansys Workbench, exported to Fluent (ASCII) and after dos2unix we imported to OpenFOAM with fluent3DMeshtofoam. Now (my idea, with Siemens NX) i can export the STL files (always inlet.txt, outlet.txt and wall.txt), move that files in my case and do the rest with scripts! After one week of learning blockMesh and snappyHexMesh i still don't know if will be succesful. I started with a simple pipe, moved to a easy part. Both were meshed with sHM and i ran the simulations successfull and they show the same results compared with the Ansys mesh. I am still having trouble with the watertightness of the STL files, for the "real parts" the surfaceCheck Tool shows openness. Our real geometries to simulate are up to 2m in diameter and have small gaps (0.8mm), so this is not so easy. Has anyone done something similar?
-Replaced ANSYS Workbench meshing with sHM?
-use blockMesh/sHM in scripted, industrial environment?


edit: OpenFOAM v2406

[happyHexMesh]

bad idea in current state of sHM

[AtoHM]

Originally Posted by happyHexMesh

bad idea in current state of sHM

If you know what you are doing, sHM is a quite capable mesher. Go ahead and show us another open source tool that gives us hex dominant, unstructured meshes .. I would be happy. I guess there is none.


Regarding your questions, I cannot go into details of how we do all of it, but in my company we mesh like 95 % of our jobs in sHM, using either Solidworks or FreeCAD as our CAD input. It is no secret (look for the discussions here in the forum) that FreeCAD can produce watertight STLs. So yeah, its possible, and it is done was we speak

[rocketLauncher]

I am working on a similar change atm. For snappyHexMesh, BaramCFD is very helpful because it provides a UI to make the process easier. It's still in development so you have to be patient as not all industrial features are available. They are very responsive to feedback though.

snappy is extremely capable, but you have to dedicate time to it in order to learn how to make the most of all the features. I would highly recommend that you give yourself more time to train. Aso, read the notes of Wolf Dynamics and some article on cfdMonkey about how to improve quality.