CFD Online Discussion Forums - [OpenFOAM] Windows Meshing and paraview

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Windows Meshing and paraview

Hi, I'm using snappyHexMesh to generate OpenFOAM mesh on windows OS. I'd like view the result of the mesh but I don't know how to use paraview to see the mesh refinements.
Any suggestion?
Thank you!

Ale

Greetings Alessandro and welcome to the forum!

A few questions:

Which (unofficial) OpenFOAM port are you using for Windows?
Which installation instructions have you followed?
Have you studied the tutorials in the OpenFOAM User Guide first?

Best regards,
Bruno

Hi Bruno,
1. OpenFOAM for MS windows http://sourceforge.net/projects/openfoam-mswin/
2. Just unzip the file
3. Yes, I've seen the tutorials but they refer to paraFOAM.

I've installed paraView 4.1.0 for windows. I've also generate (succesfully) the mase with snappy, but I don't know how to see that in paraview.

Hi Alessandro,

That's a pretty outdated and unsupported project, but that's up to you! ;)

I usually suggest blueCFD-SingleCore, which is more recent and has a bit of support: http://code.google.com/p/bluecfd-singlecore/ - Disclaimer: I'm the guy responsible for it :)

Either way, a good wiki page with a full list of available variants is this one: http://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Installation/Windows

Anyway, ranting aside, the solution is simple and has been discussed here on the forum in the past... let me see if I can find it... here's one:

Quote:

Originally Posted by wyldckat (Post 325529)

Mmm... OK, two additional solutions that might work:

If you can export the case once again to VTK, then run foamToVTK with the option "-ascii":

Code:

foamToVTK -ascii
Since you are using ParaView 3.10.1, then you can use the internal reader for OpenFOAM cases. Simply create an empty file with the extension ".foam" in the base folder of the case and open that file in ParaView.
To create said empty file, you can run in the Windows Command Line window the following command:

Code:

echo. > case.foam

Basically, for the first one, you can open in ParaView, the ".vtk" files located at "VTK"; for the second one you can simply open "case.foam" in ParaView. And yes, it still applies for ParaView 4.x ;)

Best regards,
Bruno

Thank you Bruno,
now I'm able to see my mesh and looks great! It was generated into 2 time step.
How can I use it? Can I just copy the polymesh folder of folder 2 into constant folder?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ale.barba (Post 468211)

Can I just copy the polymesh folder of folder 2 into constant folder?

Yes, you can copy the sub-folder "polyMesh" from the time snapshot 2 to the "constant" folder and delete the folders "1" and "2".

If you were using a more recent version/port of OpenFOAM, you could use the command line option "-overwrite" in snappyHexMesh, which would tell it to always save in the latest mesh folder, i.e. "constant" in this case.