Hello guys, I am new to CFD and wish you guys can help me to solve the problem... I have created a car model in Pro-engineer and save it as a step file. Then i meshed it by importing it to Gambit. I did it in my "usual" way and after I use fluent to read the .msh file, an error message pops out....

It said, "Error: Error reading "C: My Documents\Fluent..." and" Error: No cell in zone, id = 0, ind1 = 1, indn = 0 reading cells: failed while reading section 12" "partically read grid"

I tried to modify the msh file so many times by it still get stuck. Does anyone have this kind of problem before? I would be grateful if anyone could give me a solution of it.

By the way, i have uploaded my step file of the model, the gambit save file and the mesh file on the internet. The links are:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/kgbd0n (the gambit save file)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/b41can (the mesh file)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/t1lcv7 (the step file)

Once again, many thanks and wish you guys could help me

Guys...Please help..I wait for a few days and still one one reply. Could you please at least leave a message telling me that what do you think?

Hope i can solve this problem in this month...otherwise my school term start and i can't spend much time to study CFD.

well when it writes no cells, that it really means that there are no cells.

sounds funny. Well sometimes solver tells what it finds. So it means that you did not export mesh properly. Now look at few things, in mesh there are faces or boundaries and then there are control volumes.

you are not exporting volume (or solid) to mesh file. i many times get mesh from my coworker who creates mesh, where he improperly exports mesh and solver gives type of error you mentioned. So i ask him and he exports properly.

i would suggust to have a look at some tutorial where they have exported mesh to fluent, starcd etc.

once you get mesh, let it be any format you are comfortable with,

look at

utility fe2ram -h

this is utility to convert mesh from other formats to fluent format.

if after getting mesh you see problems with boundary condition, read the damn mesh in gambit, apply BCs and export again.

Other than that leave it on God to help you and poor like me.

Thanks for your reply mate! I am so happy that finally there is a guy to help me

I will try to examine my mesh at home again.

However, I still got a few questions to ask. Is there any alternative way to check whether everything is meshed or any thing is not meshed?

Looks like there is some way to export the mesh to fluent. I am new to fluent so i just mesh the solid in gambit and export it to .msh file. After that, i just import it to fluent. This is the format i am comfortable with. Is that the best way to export the mesh to fluent? If not, what is the other way?

Last but not the least, what is the "utility fe2ram -h"? Is that a code that i need to type in fleunt?What do you mean by "this is utility to convert mesh from other formats to fluent format"? What is the "other format" and "fluent format" mean? coz i thought the mesh format is just .msh format and there is no any "fluent or other" format.

Once again, thank you very much for your help

first my apologies, i did not read your posting correctly. it seems that you are exporting mesh from gambit and still getting that error message.

When gambit writes mesh, fluent never fails to read it. So there are two possiblities

1. gambit wrote it wrongly (very unlikely, because gambit is fluent't preprocessor, they understand eachother well).

2. gambit wrote wrongly because it read it wrongly. (from your step file).

So one thing you should do is when you read mesh in gambit, please have a look at its message console. (Here it will be writing utility fe2ram -d3 -t......) and some messages.)

So lets say that it gives you error message there. Than you know what is wrong.

But lets assume that you could not make out anything from here.

And best way to check is go to volumes tab of geometries in gambut. Click delete volumes and try selecting volume. If you could select volumes here and these volumes have mesh). That means no issues in reading input files.

If there are no volumes or volume mesh. You got to check your input file.

I am pretty certain that gambit did not read your mesh correctly. Try reading it in nastran or iges format. (I always use nastran format).

and in the end, about

utility fe2ram -h

this are some utility functions you can acess from command prompt. Gambit tgrid all use them, without user noticing them.