Snappy Hex Mesh Generation: error preventing the .eMesh file generation.
 

Hi all,

I'm quite new to Open Foam (and CFD) and I believe I am running into some basic mistake.

I have created my geometries in FreeCad, saved them as .stl files and then imported to Snappy Hex Mesh GUI to generate the mesh. In most of my geometries everything went smoothly and the Mesh was generated. However, one is giving me the error "Foam Fatal IO Error: cannot find file" and the file it cannot find is the one with .eMesh extension which is usually created from the .stl files.

The procedure I followed for all geometries is the same. I mostly use the default definitions of Snappy Hex GUI (Block Mesh details: 120% of Domain Extent, volume mesh size ticked with mesh size of 1; Surface controls with Enabled Castellated Mesh Controls and the Global Castellation controls with the location in Mesh Updated and only 1 processor).

The difference I can think of between this geometry and the others is that it has more details, but adding refinement levels also doesn't solve the problem. I also didn't split the geometry by feature angle when importing the file.

Does anyone has an idea of what is causing it and how I can get rid of it?

I have attached to this message the full report from Snappy Hex Gui. The error message comes in the end (last 2 pages).

I only use the graphical interface of Snappy Hex Mesh (so typos in the code are not likely to be the cause, I suppose).


Thank you. Please do let me know if you need more information from me.

Regards,

Mariana

Hi,

I am guessing in your snappyHexMeshDict there is an entry under "features" under "castellatedMeshControls" where the ".eMesh" file is mentioned.

The error crops up because you have specified the ".eMesh" file in your snappyHexMeshDict and it is unable to find the file, probably because surfaceFeatureExtract was not run.

In order to get the ".eMesh" file, you can run the utility "surfaceFeatureExtract". What the utility does is what the name implies - extracting important features in the geometry, which might be important in some cases.

Alternatively, you can remove the ".eMesh" entry in snappyHexMeshDict and it should not give you any problems.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Antimony