Pointwise
 

Hey everyone,

I am trying to create the mesh for a wind turbine for OpenFOAM. I have the solidworks model and I imported the IGS into pointwise. My question is do I need to create a bounding box around the model or not? And if I do, how do I get pointwise to create the volume mesh between the inside of the bounding box and the surface of the turbine?

Thanks!

You do need a bounding box
 

If there is not already a bounding box in the IGES geometry, you will need to make one, either as geometry or directly as grid. In Pointwise, you first make the surface grids and then fill in the volumes.

I recommend looking at Pointwise's Reentry Vehicle tutorial to get an idea of how this works. In that case the bounding box is built directly as part of the grid without any underlying geometry.

Cyclic BC and Pointwise
 

thanks rmatus! i used a single blade and created a quarter cylinder using pointwise and then applied cyclic BCs on the two rectangular domains and wall on the rest. However, when I try and load the mesh and do checkMesh or MRFSimpleFoam I get the following error

face 0 area does not match neighbour 918 by 5.60749% -- possible face ordering problem.
patch:Periodic my area:0.00486678 neighbour area:0.00460132 matching tolerance:0.001
Mesh face:1213187 vertices:3((1.16813 1.00422 0.898764) (1.2662 1.08853 0.89365) (1.20149 1.0329 0.821765))
Neighbour face:1214105 vertices:3((0.390501 0.335707 0.133984) (0.41058 0.352968 0.0581441) (0.319981 0.275082 0.0527977))
Rerun with cyclic debug flag set for more information.

From function cyclicPolyPatch::calcTransforms()
in file meshes/polyMesh/polyPatches/constraint/cyclic/cyclicPolyPatch.C at line 179.

FOAM exiting

Any ideas on how to fix this?
Thanks!

Don't know if you fixed this or not but I believe the checkMesh is telling you the cyclic patches do not match. They must be exactly the same.

You can do this in Pointwise by creating one domain and then copy/rotate it by 90 degrees. Do not solve/optimize the domains individually. Rather solve on the first and then copy/rotate this domain to the second.

Hope this helps.

Ziad