[apr13th]

Hi everyone again,

I ran a Fluent Cell heat simulation and I want to plot the graph of temperature by time step in Excel. For doing this I need to export data.

I'm using CFD-Post and I apply the expression [volumeAve(Temperature)@ locations] for several locations.

I need each time step data of volume average temperature.

But graphploting takes a long time... for one graph takes around 3~4 hours.

Is there any method to accelerate to plot a graph? OR is there a method to export direct expression variables by time step?

[ghorrocks]

This is much better done as the solver runs rather than post processing. In CFX you can use monitor points and Fluent can do it to (but I forget what they call it).

If you want to do it post processing then I would try using a CFD-Post session file to automate the extraction of it.

[Gert-Jan]

If depends a lot on the Fluent file format. If it is .h5 or .gz-format, it takes ages to open. CFD-Post likes plain .cas and .dat files best.
Actually, CFD-Post works best with CFX-files, but that is not very help full here, I think.

Also, Fluent saves complete .dat-files with all variables for every time step. As a result, every file is unnecessary large and takes long to load and interpret by CFD-Post.
CFX allows you to only save the variable that you think is relevant. If you are only interested in temperature, you get small .trn-files with only temperature. You understand that this speeds up the loading and interpretation as well.

[evcelica]

Great responses,
Just wanted to add a minor thing I found a long time ago. Drive speed matters as well. If you are saving on a spinning disk hard drive, it will take longer than if files are saved to a fast SSD.