[Schnitzler]

Hi all,

I am currently trying to create a tet-Mesh including boundary Layers with cfMesh.
As far as I'm concerned with my meshDict-file everything is fine because I don't get any errors from OpenFOAM after starting typing tetMesh.

It just randomly aborts tetMesh as follows:

Created 13646 surface patches
Setting root cube size and refinement parameters
Root box (-25.6 -22.5615 -31.6) (25.6 28.6385 19.6)
Requested cell size corresponds to octree level 8
Requested boundary cell size corresponds to octree level 12
Refining boundary
Refining boundary boxes to the given size
Finished refining boundary boxes
Performing automatic refinement
Requested min cell size corresponds to octree level 12
Performing automatic refinement
0 boxes marked by curvature criteria!
23809 edge groups found!
8817 boxes marked by the corner criteria
6192 boxes marked by the corner criteria
1811 boxes marked by the corner criteria
17 boxes marked by the corner criteria
0 boxes marked by the corner criteria
0 boxed marked by partitioning criteria
0 boxed marked by proximity criteria
Finished with automatic refinement
Marking inside/outside.
Number of internal boxes is 9535005
Number of outside boxes is 8388504
Number of data boxes is 6451038
Number of unknown boxes is 250215
Refining boxes inside objects
Ref level for object box is 12 refinement thickness 0
Finished refinement of boxes inside objects
Marking inside/outside.
Number of internal boxes is 36983657
Number of outside boxes is 8388504
Number of data boxes is 6451038
Number of unknown boxes is 296058
Refining boxes near DATA boxes
Marking inside/outside.
Number of internal boxes is 42175516
Number of outside boxes is 8388504
Number of data boxes is 6758076
Number of unknown boxes is 524267
Finished refining boxes near DATA boxes
Using DATA boxes
Creating face centre labels
Creating tets from faces with centre node
Creating tets around split edges
Creating tets around edges
Killed

Is it possible that I'm running out of memory during meshing because my .fms-file is too big? The file size of the .fms is 217MB, my memory is 32GB.

I created the .fms using multiple .stl-files on which I first created a quite fine surface wrap (see pictures attached). Then I merged these into one .stl with cat command in OpenFOAM and converted the resulting merged.stl into a .fms-file using the surfaceToFMS command.
In the merged.stl some faces of the previously wrapped .stl-files intersect each other, does that generally have a negative effect on cfMesh?

Thank you very much for your help

[Schnitzler]

So I found the issue, running tetMesh simply needs much more memory than cartesianMesh.

The fineness of the input surface file does not make a difference there, the main problem is just the fineness of the cellSize settings in meshDict.
What is interesting is that I can create a much finer mesh with cartesianMesh using way less memory that for a coarse tetMesh.