Cooling Coils - Elbows

Eric R.

Hello Gambit/Fluent users:

I am creating 3-D helical cooling coils in a tank in AutoCAD and would like to import it into Gambit; similar to the picture in this link (courtesy of Fluent News): http://www.fluent.com/about/news/new...1v10i1/a12.htm

I need to attach a 90 degree elbow on each end of the coil bank so that I can run it out of the top of the tank. This might be more of an AutoCAD question, but I cannot join a 3-D polyline and a 2-D polyline! I used a 3Dspiral LISP program to create the center line for the coils, and extruded a 2-D circle along the path to create my volume. You can start a 2-D polyline from the endpoint of the 3-D polyline, but you cannot extrude over the length of the entire geometry (coil + 2 elbows) because you cannot join or union 2D & 3D polylines. The path needs to be pretty symmetric b/c I need to use the cooper meshing scheme.

If you have any advice or have experienced this before, I would greatly appreciate any suggestions you may have. Thank you.

-Eric