Recovering Fluent surfaces in ParaView
 

Hi!

I'm in the process of divorcing Ensight (crashes wayyy too often), and considering ParaView as my new tool to visualize Fluent simulation results.

Everything is going smoothly, except that I can't figure out how to read/identify the surfaces I had already defined in my Fluent simulation (floors, ceiling, people, etc).

Many old posts recommend using Filters -> Extract Data, but that filter doesn't seem to exist anymore. I've tried all of the "Extract <something>" filters and none seems to do the trick.

I'm reading my data files raw from Fluent (without going through the Ensight format) because all the posts I read regarding exporting data seemed to be very old and from times when ParaView did not offer to option to read .cas/.dat files.

I'd really appreciate some help!

I think what you mean is that you have defined some boundary conditions in Fluent which are not appearing in Paraview. I dont think it's possible, until you have define them as separate geometric entity during meshing itself, Paraview will see no difference between them. This is what I think and have experienced, but again I never used the Fluent RAW data and always used the Ensight Binary format in Paraview.

Thanks cfd_newbie. You are right, I'm trying to recover my original boundary conditions. I should have specified that those BCs were defined during meshing, and not on Fluent itself, just as you mention I should do.

Also, I tried exporting into Ensight Gold format (the only Ensight format Fluent will let me export in), which gives me an .encas file, but Paraview will only read what it calls Ensight Gold but is an .case file.

Do you knwo if there's any other file format that I could export on so that I can retrieve my original BCs?

Thanks!

Yes Ensight Gold format is the best format for Paraview(!) your *.encas file is correct just rename it to *.case and it should work, (do not change the names of other EnSight files).

Interesting. I renamed the format and Paraview gave me an error yesterday. I'll try it again then and let you know what happened. So if I import it as .case I should be able to recover my BCs?

Ok, I was able to read my .case file on Paraview (somehow Paraview doesn't seem to like names with spaces, so that was the error I was getting previously).

So now I can recognize my pre-defined BCs when looking at the case in "Outline" form, but I don't know how to modify them or recover them...

Any clue?

Found it!!

I just need to run the filter "Extract Block".

All set!!