Hi,

I am working on a conjugate heat transfer problem which includes solid parts for conduction and air domain for force convection. The geometries of the solid parts are quite complex and include thin wall parts (such as heat sink where the fins are NOT simply straight). The solid parts were built on CAD systems.

What mesh generator(s) will be capable to read the geometries from CAD (or STL/STEP/igs format), and then mesh it?

I have looked into cartesian grid, but, to resolve the thin wall geometries, at least 2 cells cross the wall are needed. Although one will coarsening the grid away from the wall, but, the number of elements will still exceed several millions (may be in the 10 million range). This is too much to handle.

Open Source will be ideal (that can still read stl/step/igs format), but, might consider commercial mesher if not too expensive.

Another possibility is to mesh each solid parts and air domain indivisually, then, combine all the meshes togather. But, then, one will need a solver that can handle interpolation at the common boundaries. Does this type of solver exist?

Thanks!

cchou

I would recommend Gridgen. I did some very complex meshing using this software. I konw it can read IGES, not sure about other formats though. There is a free trail available so you could give it a try.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply!

I did look into Gridgen about 2 years ago. At the time, it was not quite straight forward to use. It is not cheap either. Maybe I will check out the latest version later.

cchou

You can use GridZ from www.zeusnumerix.com. GridZ can read IGES and has created 1 billion cells. If you are a researcher then you can have it very cheap. Mail to abhishek@zeusnumerix.com