[balrog_f]

I am trying to mesh a thin disc with spherical indentations on it. To proper model the heatflux of the disc i am refining my mesh near the disc wall. For this i am splitting my "disc block" near the disc (direction:normal to the disc). When i am using a block height of 1mm, for the block which is closest to the disc wall, ICEM perfectly meshes my spherical indentations and the disc with a high quality hex mesh (yes i am using ogrid). When I am using a block height of 0.5 mm my mesh completely collapses and i get a quality of -1. What could be the reason for this? Is there a minimum block height in ICEM?



What I already tried/checked:
- Meshing a plain disc without indentations doesn't give any error with a block height of 0.5 mm
- all edges are correctly assigned.
- I refined the 1mm block so the element size matches the ones in the 0.5mm block. This is also completely fine so small elements can't be the reason


Does anyone has an idea what could cause this very strange problem?



BTW: I am using the mesh refinement function of ICEM for refining, maybe this could cause the problem

[bluebase]

Hi balrog_f,


by default ICEM associates premesh faces to the nearest surface. This setting is fine for the majority of cases. For thin geometry or sharp corners, this setting sometimes is not good enough and the nearest surface might be the oposite side. That's when there occur "folded" or degenerated blocks.

In your case, you might need to assign faces manually to their respective surfaces. That way you avoid any miss-associations.


A first indication usually is to show associations of edges, found in the context menu of edges. Arrows will show the resulting associations of the current setting.
You probably have a better idea by using Scan Planes which is to be found in the context menu of premesh (in the model tree).
With this feature, you can extract 2d slices of the premesh. This will help in getting a better overview.


A less probable cause could be the topology tolerance, which might is not suitable of your geometry scale. Make it at at least a magnitude smaller than your smallest dimension.



If you can't find a solution, make some screenshots and post them here.







Best regards,
Sebastian

[balrog_f]

Originally Posted by bluebase

In your case, you might need to assign faces manually to their respective surfaces. That way you avoid any miss-associations.

This solved the problem. Awesome! Thank you very much!