Automatic meshing strategies
 

Hello all

I've tried comparing different automatic meshing strategies using standard OpenFOAM tools.

I've used cfMesh (now part of OpenFOAM 1712 from ESI OpenCFD), snappyHexMesh, foamyHexMesh.
I've also used Salome and Netgen mesher to make an automatic setup, but you need Salome installed for that.

The meshes can be seen in the following imgur album.

Some notes.

cfMesh
Easy to use, produces quality meshes and layers really really fast.
Minimal tinkering to get an acceptable mesh.
Only thing is that the starting point must be one airtight stl.
Very good usage manual.

snappyHexMesh
Pretty fast, many parameters to tinker with.
Layers and feature snapping can be a pain to get right.
Some tinkering is needed.
Well documented and many of tutorials.

foamyHexMesh
Very slow, super duper many parameters to adjust.
The whole meshing process is somewhat confusing.
Requires much tinkering to get an acceptable mesh.
The idea behind it is good, but really need some further development.
Not a lot of usage and documentation is sparse.
I do not see how this is better than snappyHexMesh atm.

Salome/Netgen
Easy to use GUI through Salome.
Netgen produces quality tet-mesh.
Can be converted to a polyHedra mesh which is of high quality.
Documentation is sparse, but hey its got a GUI and Salomes help files are quite good :)

Final note
All cases run with simpleFoam, I have not done any solution comparison as my focus was on the meshing part.
To new users I would really recommend Salome/Netgen or cfMesh.


As always the cases can be found on my github.

Thanks for that,

I'd add that Salome/Netgen can produce good boundary layers, better than snappy. However Netgen is not parallelized as far as I know, and it takes forever when you try doing complicated 3D shapes.