[MchCAD]

Hi everyone,

my job is to design a 3D-CAD model in solidworks and then import it into star ccm+.

However, I'm getting a lot of pierced faces. As the project will be an automated simulation, the fixing of the pierced faces cannot be done within star ccm+.

Now I'm wondering how you guys manage to export geometry from solidworks without obtaining pierced faces in star ccm+.
And what kind of preparations you do in solidworks to achieve that.

Is there any way to influence the surface mesh generation done within solidworks before exporting to step or parasolid?

Best regards,
Michael

[fluid23]

This is not uncommon, however, star-ccm+ is usually pretty good at fixing these faces. When you say it cannot be done within the program, are you doing manual repair or using an automated mesh operation with automatic surface repair enabled? Auto-repair almost always works for me (and I too use solidworks).

The problem could potentially lie with the parasolid export itself and not your model. If you have a license for the solidworks cadexchange then try bringing in the native CAD files rather than an export. That could help solve the issue.

Are the parts being recognized as valid when you bring them in? If not you can try checking the check parts' validity and repair invalid bodies boxes in the import surface options menu when you import.

Another potential cause of pierced faces are two separate bodies that have identical faces (that will eventually form an interface). So if you have multiple bodies contacting each other (fluid-fluid, fluid-porous, fluid-solid, etc...) the faces of the 'identical' surfaces could be piercing each other. You may need to clear contacts and imprint the bodies in surface repair manually.

If all that fails/isn't possible then your only option is to determine what faces are being pierced and try to rebuild it in CAD before you import.

[MchCAD]

Thank you so much for your answer.
It helped steering me in the right direction.

The parts all have been recognised as valid.

Unfortunately the automatic surface repair option and auto repair didn't work out.

A main problem was the contact in between the parts.
Several imprint operations with the correct priority indexing helped solving the issue.

However, I never achieved a conformal mesh. Instead I ticked the 'per part meshing' option, so for every part a seperate mesh was generated.

Regarding the pierced faces, they are still getting displayed, yet there is no problem with most of the operations.

I tried out to import the solidworks file directly with the cad exchange license. However, there was no difference.

From now on we'll try to deal with the non conformal mesh.

Thank you so much.

Best regards,
Michael