Hello All, Can anyone please tell me what the improvements or advantages of using ICEM-CFD over the old build that was in CFX5.6 ? I have some models that I had difficulty meshing in build, I was going to try them again, since I have more experience and I wonder if ICEM-CFD may be better. Akin

Hi Akin,

ICEM-CFD's strength is in meshing complicated models imported from a solid modelling package. It handles small gaps, sliver surfaces and other CAD nasties very well.

ICEM-CFD's weakness is it is a terrible solid modelling package. You can do basic solid modelling operations, but it is quite frustrating. Using a seperate solid modelling package to produce the geometries is recommended.

CFX-Build's strength is that it is a reasonable solid modelling package. It is not as nice as the current ANSYS Workbench package which is a full parametric solid modelling package, but it certainly a lot better than ICEM-CFD.

CFX-Build's weakness is in meshing complicated imported geometries. It does not do this very well, and you can expect to spend a lot of time cleaning up imported geometries before you can mesh them.

Glenn Horrocks

Glen's explanation is a good example of the Law of Conservation of Misery as applied to meshing. I have yet to try a CFD mesher that does not have a serious shortcoming. The name of the game in CFD meshing seems to be to find effective work-arounds!

I will preface this by stating I am involved in selling and supporting ANSYS products. But I try to offer my experiences, good and bad.

I will agree meshing geometry from numerous sources efficiently for complex CFD & FEA calculations is a challenge. I think the ANSYS CAD2MESH W/ HEXA package has more to offer on the market today than anyone. You have a fully parametric modeling tool in Design Modeler which can be tied parametrically to all major CAD vendors. You also have CFX Mesh to create a quick hybrid tet/prism mesh on "clean" geometry.

Alternataively or in conjunction you can take that same parametric model into ICEM TET/PRISM for the more complex or troublesome geometry and with HEXA you have a top down HEX mesher which are tied to all of the solvers (ANSYS, CFX, LSDYNA including the variational technology for true optimization).

All of these tools are tied together in ANSYS Workbench. This enables you to make a change and it will be updated everywhere. You can take models directly from CAD, mesh for any type of analysis, apply boundary conditions and solve with the appropriate solver while still being modular as a product. Meaning dending on what you want to do there are different modules that enable you to accomplish what you need. There are numerous editing tools for geometry and mesh. So you have really every tool to get the job done.

The interface differences are becoming more and more transparent. The next release, 10.0, looks even more promising.

Feel free to post questions.

Derrek