Generating big meshes with GAMBIT on NT

Andrew Ooi

I am trying to generate big 3d meshes (of the order of 500 thousand to 1 million cellls) using GAMBIT 1.2 on NT. My PC has 1/2 a gig of RAM and about 14 gig of disk space and it is a Pentium 450.

I can generate the mesh okay but when it comes to exporting it to FLUENT 5 format or GAMBIT file format, I keep getting problems. The problems I am getting is not repeatable and is very unpredictable. They are

1) Sometimes when I try to export the mesh in FLUENT 5 format, sometimes GAMBIT just sits there and hangs. (I left GAMBIT running overninght).

2) Sometimes GAMBIT give me a mesh but when I try to read the mesh into FLUENT or tgrid, it doesn't work and it gives me an error message saying faces not connected to node etc. Note that I have checked the mesh inside GAMBIT itself and the mesh is okay.

3) Sometimes while I export the mesh, it says that there is memory access violation but it still gives me a mesh which doesn't work.

4) Sometimes it works !

Does anyone have the same sort of problems ? I have a suspicion that it is a memory problem but I cannot be sure. Can any respond to this ?

Thanks.