ICEM-Periodically Meshing
 

Hello Foamers,

I am new to ICEM. For learning ICEM I tried to follow the tutorials coming with the software but still there is lot of things that I need to learn. I am really amazed with the capability of this product comparing to other software I've used. I am now familiar with the concept behind meshing procedures and hierarchy in the software. I have meshed several geometries using ICEM with fair quality and I am confident that I understand the idea of using basic tools inside the ICEM.

At this time, I am planning to mesh a simple geometry but as some features repeats periodically, I hope somebody can help me find a shortcut way for meshing my case.

I have a cube with number of vertically parallel hollow cylinders connected to the bottom of the cube. if I want to block it manually I will need to work on each cylinder individually (associate edge to curves, o-grid, etc) which takes a lot of time when I have too many cylinders (400-500). I wondered if I can do it for one cylinder and ICEM repeat the process for the rest (neighboring cylinders).

What I did;
I tried do the meshing for a simpler case with few cylinders and import a bigger geometry so I can replace the new geometry over the old one while having the old blocks. but I couldn't figure out how to extend my old mesh over new geometry, It was the best I could think of.

Can somebody help me out what could be the best way to mesh these kind of geometries?
Thank you
Smran

This question has been asked serveal times on the forum. There is no straight forward solution with blocking. Few solutions which come into mind are:

1. Tetra + prism meshing

2. Multizone looks promising, but I haven't explored its capability for such cases. ANSYS is working hard on MZ meshing and it looks like thier future technology.

3. Write a script to automat the geometry. If the geometry will not change in future i.e. you will solving this geometry for the rest of your degree/project then the time used in manual work will be equal to time learning the scripting. But scripting will help you in your future when you have to handle big projects. So scripting is the good skill to acquire at this stage.

4. Manually do every thing. Which is cumbersome.