Hi. I am a CFD beginner who will model turbulent flow using FLUENT from existing Star-CD model. Can I convert the Star-CD model directly and run the simulation in FLUENT package? Is there any functions or methods to do that? Or it is something not related completely between these two package? If you have any information or idea, please let me know. I appreciate your opinions. Thanks.

yes, you could do that, you have to create domain file within prostar, then read in the domain file within ICEMCFD, and write out the .msh file to fluent from ICEMCFD. One thing that the above process is not direct, and you have to have ICEMCFD.

In the lower end of the NavCentre(StarGuide), there is a folder called export. In this folder you can export grid in various formats. Most codes, probably also FLUENT, can read the NASTRAN format. Note you will only get the grid, not the boundary conditions, thermo-physical set-up and so on (So you will have to redefine this.)

Best of luck,

Paal

It is easy as long as you dont have couples and trimmed celles.

Put shells with a unique cell type on every boundary region and export all in Nastran format.

Read the file into fluent (not GAMBIT !!!) and thats it.

Is that means I just can convert mesh from Star-CD to FLUENT and I have to redo the solver and postprocessing parts in FLUENT? Thanks for your opinions.

Lam

Why would anyone ruin a perfectly good STAR model by running it in Fluent? The best you could hope for, if you are lucky, is an answer that is at least as good as STAR's (I suppose it is possible that I may be just a little biased).

The answer is - you do have to redo the set up, boundary condition values and post-processing to move to fluent or any other CFD program. This assumes that you actually can move the mesh since Fluent does not support as wide a variety of cell shapes as STAR does.

By the way if you are exporting nastran or patran or cgns from starcd to fluent 6 it will work on linux or unix but not on win2k or winXP because Fluent 6 under windows seems to have a bug. This is valid untill about March 2003 and i haven't got a clue if there was a patch for this problem.