Hi, can anyone tell me if there is a easy to use hex mesher out there than can export to cfx. I have tried patran, but am having all kinds of trouble creating the grups needed for bounday conditions. ICEM seems way too alien for me. There must be an easy to use ie cfx mesh like, program out there?

Any help would be great. Thanks Stu

I find Icemcfd very intuitive, easy to use and powerful. Have you worked through a few tuts? Or have a look at its online demos in the Ansys demoroom.

Gridgen is also quite good but I did my time on 70s era GUIs. I find its UI absolutely appalling.

I prefer ICEM, but you could try Gambit (from FLUENT) if you have access to that. Otherwise get hold of Harpoon from Shark. It is probably the most easy hex mesher nowadays. Get a free trial from http://www.sharc.co.uk/

Doesnt Harpoon create hanging nodes i.e. its not suitable for CFX?

yes and no. You can choose not to have hanging nodes activated or not in Harpoon. But I have not tried it with CFX.

When I last tried it about two years ago, CFX would not accept hanging nodes. But Harpoon is anyway a different class of mesher, it is more accurately described as an unstructured cut-cell cartesian mesher, which is not really the same as hexa. Icem is hugely powerful once you have it sussed out. Get a friend who knows it to show you some of the tricks. In my opinion, the easiest quality hexa mesher out there is CFD-Geom, from ESI-CFD, but it has limited output formats, so I'm not sure how you would get a mesh into CFX. We've found ways of getting a Geom mesh into Fluent, so it may be practical to do the same in CFX.

Joe - Gridgen's GUI isn't *that* bad. ;-)

Yes, it is old (80s, not 70s). But it works. And Gridgen's been doing hex meshing since the 1984 for everything, including CFX.

And that's why we're releasing our next generation software this summer with a new, modern, flat GUI and interaction model.