Hex meshing a cooler
 

Hi
I was wondering if you could produce a Hexa mesh for the entire cooler configuration and the blocking strategy involved? In the attached Fig meshing was done using WB - It had hex mesh in the outer domain and tet mesh around the pipes, the inner fluid was not modelled. (not satisfied..too many elements)
It would be nice to have a hex mesh everywhere, can this be done by:
- 2D blocking and sweeping around a profile for the pipe and doing a separate 3D blocking for the outer domain?
- Full 3D blocking Top-Down approach? there are 44 pipes so it will be a massive task.
If someone has done this before or have a better idea let me know.
If you want to try it..use 10m pipe length, D of 6.625" (there is a thickness but can be ignored for now), curvature R=1.5D.

Cheers

Any suggestions?

That is what I would do if I wanted a hex-mesh of decent quality.
The task might seem to be huge, but it is actually just 44 times an O-Grid. If you start now and know what you are doing, you will be done before lunch ;)
There might be other possibilitise, e.g. mesh only one of the cylinders and copy the mesh.

This would be much easier to do one and then instance. If you line up your distribution properly on all sides of the instanced "cell", you can then merge nodes within a tolerance to get conformal mesh and no interfaces.

If this is 2.5D and you want to do it the dirty way, surface mesh it and extrude the mesh.


Stu