A genearl question on STAR CCM
 

Hi guys, here I get some question on meshing when using STAR CCM.

I was a FLUENT user. A normal procedure to do CFD analysis is,
1. Geometry in ProE
2. Geometry clean in 3rd party software
3. Surface (and volume) mesh in 3rd party software
4. If necessary, volume mesh in TGrid
5. Analysis in FLUENT
And this procedure gives me a lot of freedom and capability to deal with complex geometries.

Now I am switching to a new environment, where the 3rd party software is not available. However I can still use ProE, Gambit, and STAR CCM. Now my question is that this kind of combination still provides me capability to deal with relatively complex geometries? If yes, would you please roughly describe the way you do it?
Many thanks.

*sigh*
nobody knows?

You can do all of it in STAR-CCM+ without any 3rd party software. You read in the dirty cad from PRoE, clean it up with surface wrapping, remesh the surface as necessary and mesh the interior. All those things are available inside STAR-CCM+ and they are a generation ahead of anything in Gambit and as good or better than most other 3rd party tools.
Get some training.

STAR CCM+ has a reasonably good geometry cleaning tool. You can go and manually correct the imported geometry. However if the geometry is too complicated and there are a lot of issues then it becomes painful. There is an auto-repair option, but you may want to be careful while using this option.

Like in TGrid there is a surface wrapper that helps in approximating the surfaces. This is a very good feature using which you can still work with complex geometries, with some approximation. STAR CCM+ by itself can handle meshing, flow solving and post-processing and so can easily replace the functions of Gambit, Fluent and the post-processor you use.

Thank you sir for your replying. Those definitely are great advise and suggestions. I did STAR CCM+ tutorial like twice, and got some general feeling on this software but didn't know it's powerful like this.
I will do more tutorial as you suggested.

The geometry I am going to deal with won't be very complicated. I bet the STAR CCM+ should be able to handle that. I guess I will do some more training to know what can be done in STAR CCM+ and what can not be done.
Appreciate your valuable information.