[joegi]

Hi everybody,

From this forum I can see that others guys are having problems trying to import meshes into openfoam.

So far I ran all the tutorials and I can tell you that openfoam looks quite powerful. The only drawback I have found is the mesh capability.

I'm a quite experience user in meshing, and I usually deal with very comlex geometries, but so far it has been impossible to me to import one complex case into openfoam. I tried all available formats and I always get a different error.

If any of the developers of openfoam or somebody else, knows a straightforward method to import a mesh, let say for instance in ideas or fluent format, I will really appreciate if you can post it on this thread. And when I say to import a mesh, I mean to import all the characteristics of the mesh, that is boundary conditions, surfaces, materials, everything.

For the moment I find quite cumbersome to generate a mesh with blockmesh, it's very time cosuming and I deal with very complex geometries.

Waiting for some enlighten advices and comments,

Cheers,

joel

[hjasak]

I am very surprised you're having problems with mesh import - both the Fluent and Star importer have been thoroughly tested and are used regularly. The only thing you need to worry about is to produce the original mesh in ascii format. OpenFOAM is regularly used with complex and industrial geometries and I rarely hear of any problems.

If you're still having trouble, feel free to send me one of your meshes (say, a Fluent .cas file) and I'll have a look (most of the mesh converters have been written by me).

Hrv

[joegi]

Hi Hrvoje,

I'm quite happy that the head of the openfoam team replied. Just give me an email address where I can send you one file and voila.

Cheers,

Joel

[hjasak]

For your info, this is resolved: Icem mesh format is slightly out and there was an error in boundary definition. When the mesh went through Fluent all was well.

Hrv

[joegi]

Regarding to the moving meshes topic. How many degrees of freedom can I simulate on openFOAM (in 3d). I will be very happy if I can do a 6DOF simulation on openFOAM.

joegi

[billy]

Hi,

The way I import meshes to OpenFOAM is to save any mesh file as a Gmsh format, which is easy to create with a simple c program. Then, I use gmshToFoam and autoPatch to create the patches for BC.

Billy.

[hjasak]

There's no reali limitation: you are free to move the boundary points in any way you like, giving a motion vector in every point. A 6-DOF solver is clearly only a small cubset of such motions, where the shape of the boundary remains fixed and only a solid body translation-rotaton is prescribed. In other words, the motion solver is much more powerful because it can deal with arbitrary deformation as well as 6 DOF motion.

If you think about a 6 DOF solver, it will give you 3 translations and 3 rotations as a function of time (call it a translation vector and a rotation tensor). You can then move all the points on the boundary in the same way and you're done.

Hrv

[joegi]

Hi Hrvoje,

Regarding to the last mesh I sent you (the fixed one). I haven't been able to convert it using fluentMeshtofoam, I don't know what is happening, can you take a look at it?

Joel

[pbruel]

Hi,

I am a new comer in the OpenFoam world an I would like, in a near future, to bring in some turbulent combustion models I am familiar with. My sole concern is that the mesh generator I am using (Simail 6.5) can provide, after conversion, so-called universal I-DEAS files (.unv extension). Is this type of file equivalent to the .ans files referred to in the (short) ideasToFoam description ?

Thanks

Pascal

[nikhilmadduri]

Hi all,
Can anyone please tell me why I am not able see a 3D mesh?? I have generated a mesh around a cylinder. I can see only the faces of the mesh having the grid lines but not inside the mesh. So what should I do to have a grid even inside the mesh covering up the entire volume of the mesh?? Am I clear to u?? Please tell me if I need to explain more.

Regards,
Nike.