How to generate refined 3D tetrahedra etc mesh for free
 

Hello,

could you share your experience in creating non-trivial geometries and making a refined mesh afterwards? By "refined" I mean for example finer at some boundaries comparing with inner cells.
blockMesh is handling only hexaedra and does no refinement...

Thanks!

Hi, Kārlis I do not have e
 

Hi, Kārlis

I do not have experience with it, but would you like to have a look at CAELinux(http://www.caelinux.com)? It includes OpenFOAM 1.4.1 and the basic pre/post processor, SALOME, seems really interesting... (although it appears it needs some intermediate format conversion to pass data to FOAM (via UNV files). It also includes GMSH.

Another distro?! Not again! I
 

Another distro?! Not again!
I'll take a look later, but I would rather prefer compiling from source and running on my own distro.

By the way - any comments about TetGen?

Since it is a livecd, you just
 

Since it is a livecd, you just run it, and cherry-pick packages you'll install on your fav distro

Hi, Kārlis did you look at
 

Hi, Kārlis

did you look at the URL???? SALOME exists as a standalone package as well (I think the downloadable standalone package has binaries). In the Wiki there is also an example of using FOAM with SALOME. And John is right, I think. It is **merely** a (super-) supercharged PCLinuxOS LiveCD loaded with some really cutting edge scientific tools...For my part at least (as I am not a Linux guru, just vanilla user...), it would be a pain in the !@#$ to locate and install all these packages on my favorite distro...

When download completes, I'll
 

When download completes, I'll write DVD and try it.
One more thing I would like to know - how about polyhedra mesh generators? Is it only gambit and similar proprietary software, that can make hexa- or even more face element meshes?

...not sure about this one (so
 

...not sure about this one (sorry). Maybe someone else could jump in and answer this one...
Before anything else check the tut. here:
http://www.caelinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc:CAETutorials#Salome_.26_OpenFOAM_tuto rial:_3D_CFD_analysis_of_a_Y-shaped_pipe_.28CAELinux_2007.29

Hi, This is the link to the
 

Hi,

This is the link to the salome_meca binary package.

ftp://cae-linux:salome@caelinux.dyndns.org/packages/salome-meca-2007.1/SALOME-MECA-2007.1-GPL.tgz

installation notes here:

http://caelinux.com/CMS/index.php?op...d=41&Itemid=40

This is different version from the one in Salome-platform.org. This includes the Code_aster module.

I wonder if FoamX can be integrated to salome as a module as what Code_Aster did.

Hi, I have some comments a
 

Hi,

I have some comments about Tetgen. It is easy to refine your tet mesh generated with Tetgen if you have a set of points where you want refine.
This is done using the '-r' switch. Off course you will need to provide a file 'XXX-a.node' (where xxx is the name of your mesh) with the additional points you want to add. These points are usually easily derived from the estimated error on your solution..
Meshing rather complex shapes can indeed be done with salome (or netgen standalone (smaller)) or using STL input files and meshing them with tetgen. In my experience (2 years ago) Tetgen performed better then Netgen both on speed as robustness...
Regards,

Simon