Free CAD for CFD analysis
 

Hello.

I am looking for a good 3D CAD freeware that is capable of medium level 3D modelling (modelling buildings, pipes, road tunnels, furnaces etc) and that can provide .iges and/or .stl files as output.

I so far I have been looking at 3Dvia shape and avoCADo.

The tools available at my company are autocad versions, tekla and microstation. I do not know if theses tools are good for making 3D models->CFD.

I need a basic tool that is easy to learn and will create good surfaces.

I have experience from working with Ideas and Catia V5.

Best regards
Daniel Engman

Suggestions?

Look that top menu bar, the third (or First) button from the right says [ Search]
your query has been answered so many times
good luck

Daniel:

I'll give this a shot since coincidentally a friend recently asked. In no particular order...

DoubleCAD XT - http://www.doublecad.com/
Blender - http://www.blender.org/ (the OpenFOAM folks seem to like this)
MiniCAD - http://me-wiki.eng.uab.edu/etlab/?page_id=261
OpenCASCADE - http://www.opencascade.org/ (This is a CAD kernel, not an end user tool)
BRL-CAD - http://brlcad.org/

Also, don't forget about Google's SketchUp.

Hello gents,

I am using a software called freeCad. It is quite powerful CAD and it looks quite similar to SolidWorks and Catia.

Using it, I made a simple geometry (a sphere) to test the export tool. I need to generate a .stl file but I didn't find to do this in freeCad. I the official website there is a information that is possible to export geometries in .stl but I only found "Mesh format". I tried to use this format and didn't work properly.

Anybody knows how to deal with this problem ?

Cheers,

Rodrigo

Try Salome. It is not CAD, but it has good 3D modeller with the ability to export 3D models into various formats (.stl and.idges also)

Hi Serge,

Thanks for this.

I played a bit more with freeCad and a get a .stl that paraView can read.
In this way you need to select "Mesh format" in the export option save your file like file.stl. When you open this file you will see a lot of estrange symbols but this happens because it was generated in binary form. Using the paraView we are able to see the geometry and also save it in ASCII format.

Thanks anyway about the Salome program.

Rodrigo

Autodesk 123D http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rc...mKy1ArnCPezn1w

CAD for CFD: CAESES
 

There is a full pro version of CAESES for students and PhD students. The software comes with a specialized CAD modeler for CFD engineers. The focus is simulation-ready geometry, and it is able to export STL, IGES, STEP and more.