Meshing Foam Structure
 

Hi there,

I am currently working on my Master thesis and therefore I'm trying to do an flow analysis of a ceramic foam (picture 1).

First I want to explain my whole working process:
I got the stl data (< 100mb in size) from my professor. I load them into ICEM CFD and tried to repair the structure, but in most cases our computer system would crash so I left this part out. In the next step I would define a cylinder surrounding the structure for a closed geometry. Next I define the mesh parameters, where I enabled Curvature/Proximity and set the Foam as an internal wall, so the mesher would create a surface mesh there. I use the octree method to generate my unstructured mesh, that way I actually do get a mesh. I did manage to get a few meshes with acceptable mesh quality (very few elements with a quality of less than 0.2). But as you can see in picture 2 the mesher would flush the foam structure with elements. I think the structure has holes and the mesher therefore assumes that the foam in hollow. When I did the mesh check I got some errors and problems like surface orientation, triangle box, multiple edges and so on. I cases were Icem gave me the option to fix them I used the automatic fixation. But I did not find any solution for surface orientation for instance. The last step would be creating the output file, where I always got the warning: ..Fluent needs a complete boundary (or shell in 3D) ...

My questions are:
1) Is ther any way to prevent the mesher from flushing the inner structure?
2) How I can I deal with the shown errors, like surface orientation, uncovered faces and other, so I can create a Fluent output file?

Thank you for your help in advance