How to ICEM to Structural
 

Hello
I have meshed two parts of a solid and fluid geometry in ICEM CFD, now i want to solve my solid part in Transient Structural and my fluid part in CFX, but when i transmit my mesh into the Structural solver, the solver merges two parts of fluid and solid, and sees them as one solid part.
how can i separate these two parts and solve each one in it's own solver?
i have already separated domains of solid and fluid in ICEM by creating material point in the middle of each geometry.
Can any one help me on this?

I never did this, but I assume you can just make a copy of the project, then in one of them delete all the created elements that are associated with part B. Then in the other project (copy) you delete elements of part A. That's what I would try, there might be some more elegant way, though.

Hi Omid,

the important concept to solve your problem is to understand what makes a mesh a mesh domain. It's the fluid mesh and it's boundary mesh. So each seperate part has to have it's own boundary mesh. So the interface between two fluid volumes should be two (identical) layers of elements.

It is not obvious where you can do this in ICEM. If you just convert the whole premesh to unstructured, you'll see that you'll end up with only a single layer of line or shell elements for 2D and 3D meshes, respectively.
Most solvers will recognize this as internal interface.
The "magic" is to only expert one fluid volume to unstructured at a time, meaning:

1. Show only the blue volume part (and its boundary parts), hide the rest
2. Create Premesh on this selection (meshes only shown parts)
3. Export premesh to unstructured, replace any previous (and obsolete) meshes
4. Hide the blue volume part and its boundary parts
5. Show the red volume part and its boundary parts
6. Create Premesh
7. Export Premesh to unstructured, merge with the previous mesh

This should yield a mesh with two interface layers - as long every interface edge is associated to a curve.


Unfortunately, i am not a CFX user, so i am not completely sure whether it works with CFX. However, this process has worked with all other solvers i have worked with, including Fluent.


Best regards,
Sebastian