How to deal with self-intersecting surfaces??
 

Hi everyone,

Here's my issue. I have a geometry I'm trying to surface mesh in order to use for CFD. Basically it's a group of coils that are to be placed in a fluid domain in order to obstruct the flow. However, inherent to the finite element simulations that I used to generate the coil configuration, the coil geometry is self-intersecting (i.e. the coil tubes overlap at some points). You can imagine this creates problems when volume meshing. Is there ANY way in ICEM to deal with these overlaps (get rid of the interior surfaces altogether)? I attached some images to show you what I'm talking about. The second image was taken from the ICEM help files to show you how the tubes look when they are overlapped.

Thanks for the help!

Try using the top down (Octree) mesher with a material point defined at some point in the fluid volume. I think this will walk over the dirty geometry. Once you have your mesh, throw away the volumes to be left with the surface mesh only.

Stu

I am getting the same problem .. When I run Fault Detection in DesignModeler, I found self intersections .. Can anybody help ?