[Arti]

Im new to Openfoam and am trying my best to learn. I would like to ask some help on exporting openfoam mesh to fluent. For example i want to export the mesh from icoFoam cavity tutorial. How do i go about doing it. I tried using the command foamMeshToFluent but it is not possible.

Thanks.

[kwardle]

I am not aware of any utilities for converting a foam mesh to anything else--all are for converting other mesh formats to foam. There is a foamDataToFluent utility which may be useful to you. I am not sure what you are trying to do, but if you have access to Fluent presumably you have access to Gambit as well--why not just remake the 2d mesh in Gambit? A Fluent 2D mesh is different than a openFoam 2D mesh anyway.
Hope something here is useful to you...

[hellorishi]

I guess this might answer your question.

http://www.opencfd.co.uk/openfoam/doc/fluentPost.html

You will need to create a foamDataToFluentDict file as explained above.

If you could explain your problem in detail, it might be easier for others to answer...

[Arti]

Just want to learn the features of Openfoam for my final year project which consists of comparing different mesh generation software. So i would like to gain more CFD solver experience and to learn creating mesh in Openfoam so that i can transfer it to fluent to compare the results. Withouht a gui creating a blockmesh is by far harder than gambit but its worth learning a few tricks.I will try the page about the fluent info.

[hellorishi]

I guess the OpenFOAM is not the best utility for creating mesh.

blockMesh is good only for simple "academic" cases & not for industrial applications.

snappyHexMesh is better for complicated Geometries, but tricky to use.
http://www.tfd.chalmers.se/~hani/kur...ppyHexMesh.pdf

[prapanj]

Hi Arti,

As mentioned above, snappyHexMesh is a wonderful tool. It is not that tricky actually, I have been using it for a while and pretty confident with it. It is fun creating meshes in snappy actually. There is an open source tool called netgen which you can use to generate tet meshes. All you need is a STL file for your geometry. You may convert the netgen mesh to foam using netgenNeutralToFoam utility which comes installed with you OF. If your work is about comparing grid generators, I recommend you to learn snappyHexMesh by all means. Snappy for external meshes and netgen from internal meshes is what I use.
If you could post what error it shows when you try to convert your format to Fluent, I may be able to comment on it.

Prapanj

[Arti]

Well my situation is this. Im being asked to use this CFD solver called AVL swift. And the geometry im working on is just a simple airfoil but swift requires a 3D drawing of the airfoil. SnappyHexmesh seems like a good option for my case. Am not sure if the exported mesh would work for my solver which is very picky about file types. The meshes that can be read by fluent works find for swift though. Then I tried loading an STL airfoil file into it, it works fine but trying to make a mesh using Swift is by far the hardest thing i have done. There are no usable tutorials out there. I will explore a little on Snappyhexmesh.

[prapanj]

when you say you have to use a 3D grid, does it mean 1 unit along spanwise direction? Which means you make a 2D grid and then extrude right? Do you have access to the software called gridgen?
If it is a prism ( aerofoil extruded), you may need the STL of the prism. Now if you can tell me all the grid formats that your software can read, I may be able to make some suggestions.

Prapanj