Folks, We normally run classes of problems with tractable bottom up geometry which we mesh in a straightforward fashion using Gridgen, ICEM or Gambit as appropriate.

We are now running into problems where we get cad geometry which is simply not going to work out of the box. These are underhood, external aero type problems but they are not automotive. Cant say more.

As an ex-adapco Prostar user, I would have used ProAm or whatever its called now and wrapped the surface to get a contiguous surface for meshing.

Whats the state of third party tools that perform these sort of functions? I see that ANSA is still a playere here. Any other tools that can do this? Any that are cheap or free ;-)

Thanks - Andy

the star-ccm+ wrapper is very good for this kind of stuff, we use it to prepare full underhood geometries, it is a lot lot easier to use than proAM too..

on a related note for Andy, is your software now capable of unstructured stuff or tets? i remember a while back it was structured cartesian....

For low speed stuff we use fluent, so when we need to we can run a tet mesh - Andy

I believe ICEM also has a 'wrapper' - Look under Geometry > Create/Modify Surface > Geometry Simplification.

Gridgen has a capability called quilts and solid modeling.

Check out Materialise from 3-Matic or Harpoon from Sharc. Both will wrap - Harpoon will also give you a fluid grid. I have no experience with Materialise - I've just seen the advertisements. Harpoon was pretty good when I looked at it. CCM+ is very good. Hypermesh is also very good at cleaning up, and even making simple, geometry. Its surface mesh is pretty good as well.

paulh

ccm+ wrapping is pretty good but volume meshing is poor....

I disagree, the volume meshing is great if you know what you are doing, what do you mean by poor?

For more simple geometries maybe... For really complex ones I have to remove thousands of "invalid" cells to get it running. However, sometimes it fails. Take the mesh to ProSTAR 4 and search for concave or centroid cells - in really complex geometries (full cars) you will find lots of poorely shaped strange looking cells. This happens for both Polyhedral and trimmed meshes. Tetra is ok.

How odd, I have never had that many problems and I have wrapped and volume meshed full underhoods, are you sure you are using the latest version?

No longer. We have switched to other codes. However, we saw that problems up to version 2.08. Did you check your mesh? ccm+ has a very stable solver and sometimes runs on theses dirty meshes.... Seems like some internal solver tricks to handle theses cells....

The meshing did take a step forward after 2.08, there is also a bad cell treatment option now, the hex mesher is really quick

I can not try anymore. We went to another tool which we are more happy with. I no longer have ccm+ licences.