[akarfirath]

Hello everybody. I am trying to simulate CHT phenomena which has got solid parts, liquid domain with boiling and also gas flow. I had a assembly of solid parts and I need to extract the volumes of gas and liquid in STAR CCM+. However operation>extract volume command is very sensitive to geometry. And generally ends up with "Can not find topology....." error message. I tried also Surface Wrapper Tool but in that case I had non conformal interfaces at where I have very thin sections and details which leads to poor accuracy in CHT simulations.
Is there any body who worked with this kind of CHT simulations and performed the preparation of the volumes in STAR CCM+? I would be appreciate if you can share your experience with me for this painfull task

[ashokac7]

Originally Posted by akarfirath

Hello everybody. I am trying to simulate CHT phenomena which has got solid parts, liquid domain with boiling and also gas flow. I had a assembly of solid parts and I need to extract the volumes of gas and liquid in STAR CCM+. However operation>extract volume command is very sensitive to geometry. And generally ends up with "Can not find topology....." error message. I tried also Surface Wrapper Tool but in that case I had non conformal interfaces at where I have very thin sections and details which leads to poor accuracy in CHT simulations.
Is there any body who worked with this kind of CHT simulations and performed the preparation of the volumes in STAR CCM+? I would be appreciate if you can share your experience with me for this painfull task

Yeah!! It could take days for geometry preparation itself. Take solid parts, clean one by one, even intersecting faces are bad during volume extraction. Remove all the red patches for each geometry.
Then create multi-part interfaces, check for intersecting faces during interface formation too. It is better to combine 2 parts with same material as a single part if possible.
Exclude small parts wherever possible. Like Nuts and bolts.
For interface formation, take 2 parts at time, and don't use imprint all command, rather imprint each pair, and manually check each pair.
when interfaces between all these solid parts are formed, check for all the solid parts in single surface repair. everything should appear zero here.
Then combine all parts, delete interfaces, and close all the openings for fluid volume.
Now split by surface topology (there will be manifold edges between each part and also between new filled holes, but don't worry)
After splitting you should get solids as well as fluid volumes and also interfaces between each parts in contacts.
It is quite complicated, but keep patience, the end result is quite satisfying.

[cwl]

Originally Posted by ashokac7

Then combine all parts, delete interfaces, and close all the openings for fluid volume.
Now split by surface topology (there will be manifold edges between each part and also between new filled holes, but don't worry)
After splitting you should get solids as well as fluid volumes and also interfaces between each parts in contacts.

The thing is that - this way breaks the idea of Parts Operations pipeline.

Since Extract Volume is a fussy operation - for simplicity you could use Extract Internal Volume in 3D-CAD module.

In general it is possible to do that with Extact Volume operation,one just needs to practice first on simple cases and to learn dealing with the Imprint operation, which actually can work at least in three ways.

[akarfirath]

Thank you very much for your answer. I am following your reccomendations right now and it seems like it working. but when you have 100 different parts, this task become very sensitive to any small mistakes could be happen during work.

[pavko718]

Parts which enclose the volume you are attempting to extract must be topologically connected and completely enclose the volume of interest. If there are openings, they must be closed with patches or solid parts. One way to do that is to imprint parts together, check that everything imprinted correctly and then extract the volume. The volume extraction will create the part-to-part contacts which will be used to automatically create interfaces when parts are assigned to regions. The method described earlier (slit-by-topology) is another way to do it, but has many disadvantages: it's not a pipeline operation, part names will be lost (a big deal for 100 parts), and this method can become tedious when part connections are complex. For some difficult to imprint assemblies it can be the only way, but is usually a last resort. It's best to improve your existing parts in order to then imprint them using mesh operations, several if necessary, using various tolerances.