ICEM vs Tgrid
 

Hi,

I would like to know, what the main advantages of ICEM are compared to tgrid (if there are any)! For me the biggest advantage is the hexa meshing possibility, but for complex geometries it might not be usefull. I plan to use them in automobile industry, esp. for hvac and underhood automobile meshing. Can you you recommend any of these two meshers?

Greetings! Flo

Re: ICEM vs Tgrid
 

ICEM Tetra is definitely better for underhoods. The main advantage is that ICEM is not a surface/patch-based mesher. It is therefore not sensitive to individual surfaces that may be tiny slivers, etc. Also it can walk across small gaps between surfaces. Most other meshers mesh the surfaces first - then the interior - so they mesh each individual surface.

With ICEM - just about any geometry can be meshed....

If the geometry is very clean with not gaps, slivers, etc - then TGrid is probably faster.

Re: ICEM vs Tgrid
 

in my view the applications you are looking for, ansa + tgrid combinations is very efficient. You can create surface grid with ansa and volume mesh with t-grid thats very good combination. I have created many underhood meshes with ease with this combination.

ICEM cfd is very good mesher but I would recomend it for smal mesh sizes like 5 million or so. and where you need very good quality and ICEM is not realiable for big mesh sizes. Still hex mesh capability is very good in ICEM no doubt. sachcool80@gmail.com you can write to me for any help of line

Re: ICEM vs Tgrid
 

Hi Flo

I would consider Harpoon for your type of work. The link below will show you how well it works in this area.

http://www.sharc.co.uk/html/releases...se_FordUTM.htm

Regards

Richard

Re: ICEM vs Tgrid
 

The T-grid mesher is availible in ICEM CFD 11.

Re: ICEM vs Tgrid
 

Hi, thanks for your information! As it looks everybody has its own preferences... in the long term (release 12?)Ansys probably includes the whole tgrid 'engine' into ICEM with all its features and it would be a good start using ICEM!?

Somehow it seems for me that doing the surface mesh using Ansa with good enough quality for tgrid is more difficult/time-consuming than using ICEM for the whole mesh; esp. with prism layers. Do you have similar experience?

Regards! Flo

Re: ICEM vs Tgrid
 

I would prefer ICEM over t-grid for so many reasons. Indeed t-grid uses a bottom-up approach and basically needs a surface mesh first. ICEM can do the same!

The tetra mesher uses the Octree routine which uses a patch idependent approach for surfaces, however ICEM uses the Delaunay mesher when volume is meshed from surfaces. No need of ANSA when ICEM can generate a similar surface mesh.

There are other features in ICEM too such as Multi-zone meshing etc which is quite robust and puts the right mesh in the right place!

Re: ICEM vs Tgrid
 

A feature that TGrid sorely seems to lack is to make reflections that are editable.

I have a asymmetrical cube (meaning there are dissimilar features on opposite sides) surface mesh created in TGrid through an STL file import. I need to reflect this cube so that opposing faces (one in the original and one in reflection) would now have identical features for me to apply periodic boundary conditions.

I have tried importing the 'unit cell' into Gambit for reflection, but for some strange reason, I have been unable to do this import. The surface mesh has about 86000 triangles. Its probably because of something in my original STL file, but amazingly, I am able to import into Gambit a similarly created STL file (via TGrid). Probably that was just a case of beginner's luck!

In any case, I am considering ICEM CFD and they tell me that in addition to the TGRid engine, ICEM has many other features that would also allow me to perform reflections such that the reflected entities can be edited / manipulated.

Can anyone using ICEM CFD confirm that indeed, ICEM can reflect meshes about a user-defined plane and that the reflected entities can be manually edited / manipulated ?

Thanks, Vivek