Hello all,

I am curious to know what the current opinions of people using CFX and ICEM products as to their likes/dislikes since Ansys has taken things over? This takeover is probably the biggest buzz in the CFD world for years...how it has really affected users?

Regards,

Bak_Flow

I am facing not much of problems with CFX, but yes with ICEM, in the earlier versions the gemoetry menu, I feel, was more user friendly than the new version provided ANSYS has taken things over.

I've troubles using unstructured tet mesh in ICEM 5. Prism layers always walk away at the sharp corner or tricky surfaces regardless of how fine the surface mesh is. Never recommend generating tet mesh from geometry. Eat lots of memory. Build is still better for unstructured tet mesh. However, I'm quite happy with hex mesh tool in ICEM 5 anyway.

Well even I faced similiar problems while using ICEM5 for making the prism layers in tet mesh while using the Old GUI. I was getting error messages the moment I switched on the panel for the expert options in making prisms. The only way I could solve this was to save and reopen everything in ICEM5 new GUI make the prisms and then revert back to Old GUI again.

One may ask me, why the whole silly transfers when I could do everything in the new GUI? But I guess I would have lot of people seconding my opinion that the change in the GUI was radical and it is really like learning a new software when using the new GUI.

I have sent the corresponding file (with error screenshot) to Ansys for making prisms and they could not pin point the problem nor solve it. So now I have to continue doing this weird transfer business. Has anyone faced similar trouble?? and can tell me a solution?

I am curious as to whether those struggling with ICEM have attended training? It has been my experience that the training is mandatory for a product like ICEM. The focus has always been on high end very powerfule meshing, not necessarily ease of use. So the training certainly points you in the right direction.

However, I think the "new" GUI is a huge improvement over the previous. Much more intuitive.

Have you guys tried Design Modeler and CFX Mesh in Workbench? If you have CAD geometry or you are building models from scratch, I have found it to work very nicely.

Best Regards,

Derrek

Design Modeler and CFX Mesh don't support SGI platform, which I don't really understand why. Hope this will be tackle soon. I bet SGI user will be most happy to see it done soon.

Problems could be specific. Work well on one case but worse in some cases. I went to training before but never think it's absolutely essential as long as tutorial & help manual is detail enough. You wouldn't get a tricky example in the training anyway. ICEM is still a very good mesh tool if compared with others. I still think that build generates better prism & tet mesh quality than ICEM. More user input/experience is needed to get high quality prism mesh in ICEM.

On the topic of "compulsary" ICEM training, what has been the experience of those that have attended such training?

I have not found new GUI of ICEM is friendly for me . So I still make use of the old version V4.3.But CFX5.7 seems much better than before.All these are of custom.

I like the new GUI of CFX5.7 as well. Easier to use than the previous version. Setting up the parallel solver in CFX is extremely easier. Just one command line and that's it.

ICEM still have some small bugs in the new GUI (I'm using the SGI version)... sometimes I get error like fail to pick the point or vertice or surface etc (the vertice/point/surface's obviously there & we have installed the latest patch file). I have to quit the GUI and reload ICEM again. Not sure about other version anyway.

The ICEM hex tool is quite handy once you're familiar with the procedure. I like the automatic Ogrid generation tool.

Training course will certainly help if you don't have much time to explore it yourself. The user/tutorial manual is quite complete & detail. I don't think it's an issue here.

To me it's become more complicated been able to understand the ANSYS corporation. there are a lot of comfusing structures and don't even know which one is handling what, especially, ICEM CFD and ICEM CFD 5.0-CFX, which is which? I also I greed to earlier guys who said that ICEM CFD5.0 is not user friendly at all. I prefered v4 with HEXA!! I don't like ICFD 5 because it is difficult to figure things out. Beside these, I think not much has changed. I hope ANSYS will pick ICEM 4 and modified it than taking it out almost completely.

Regards

It depends! I feel that ICEM_CFD5.0 is better. Maybe you are used to ICEM 4! But if you want to spend some time to learn ICEM_CFD5.0, you will find that it's user-friendly !