Poor mesh metrics using inflation on wall of helical pipe
 

Hi,

I'm fairly inexperienced with meshing and hope this is a trivial problem!

I have a helical pipe model which needs to be simulated with a K-w SST turbulence model for a study.

For this model I need to reduce my first layer height of the mesh to y+<1. However when I try to assign any kind of inflation layer on the wall my uniform grid turns in to unstructured tetrahedral and wedge elements and I get really poor mesh metrics.

My first layer height needs to be in the region of 2.5x10-4 mm.

The pipe has a height of 40mm, diameter of 1mm, coil diameter of 6.6mm and pitch of 20mm.

I've attached an example to show how the mesh changes, even with a large first layer I still get this issue.

Try the MultiZone with inflation layer for the wall capture and adjust the inflation details to suit your simulation. Use a Face Meshing for the O-grid.

Thanks that looks great! are you able to send the settings you used for each of the features? just as a basis so i can modify for my own wall requirements

I did not apply any settings to the MultiZone or Face Meshing. I set a global element size. I set Smooth Transition in the Inflation Layer and 10 layers. That is all.

Hi Stuart, sorry for the delayed reply. It worked really nicely thanks for the help!