Microfluidic Device Meshing
 

Hi

I'm new to the ANSYS software and I am having problems with meshing my microfluidic device (Attached Picture 1) (as Fluent tells me to improve my mesh whenever I try to run calculations on it).

The default Mesh can be viewed in detail in Attached Pictures 2-5

My question is: What are the ways that I can improve the mesh?

Any help would be very much appreciated!
Thanks!

Hi mlau3,

Welcome to the CFD-online forum.

A good mesh is a very important part of any CFD simulation. I am just a novice but I can direct you to create a better mesh. You might want to go through the Ansys Meshing tutorials to understand the meshing procedures. From the attached pictures, I believe that you generated an automatic mesh. You might want to slice your geometry (in the Design Modeler) so that you can generate hexa elements in the sweepable bodies and tetra elements in the rest during the meshing. Again you need to be careful when it comes to the quality of the mesh and you need to look at metrics like aspect ratio, orthogonality (> 0.1 for fluent) & skewness (< 0.95 for fluent) which can accessed through the mesh statistics. You should never stop at one mesh size. You can always get a better solution accuracy on refining the mesh. You will have to decide which mesh size would suit you based on the effectiveness of mesh in terms of accuracy & time, type of simulation, turbulence model, computational resources at hand etc.

I could write pages to explain the importance of a good mesh. But I would suggest you to take it slowly. Convergence, mesh sensitivity, accuracy, time step size... the list goes on.

If you don't have time to go through all the tutorials then, watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Z2v8geroQ

If you want read more about Mesh Quality, refer: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ans...h-quality.html

& http://www.arc.vt.edu/ansys_help/flu...h_quality.html

Keep me posted on how things go :).

Best,
Rahul