[Seroga]

Hi, everybody!
Could someone tell me why most of OpenFOAM tutorials cannot be opened in HelyxOS? And what should I do (or what software I must use) to see the mesh which is used in tutorial cases or geometry or smth like that?

Thanks in advance for answering!

[chegdan]

Seroga,

This is a good question. HELYX-OS is a pre-processor that will setup the case structure, import STL surfaces, and generate dictionary files to mesh with snappyHexMesh for running a predefined set of solvers. The reason why it won't load all the standard OpenFOAM cases is that 1) different solvers require different files to run (e.g. an icoFoam case does not need radiationProperties) 2) there are basic requirements that HELYX-OS must have in order to see this case as "open-able". Cases mainly do not open because of reason number 2. For example, the damBreak case does not have a snappyHexMeshDict...it will not open correctly in HELYX-OS. How do you get around this? Import the mesh. For example 1) open a new case in HELYX-OS 2) open a terminal through HELYX-OS and import a mesh e.g. move a polymesh folder from another case or import a mesh from fluent with the proper command 3) reopen/reload the same case in HELYX-OS and now you have the mesh from that other case. By creating a case first in HELYX-OS, all the basic file presence requirements are met and the GUI is happy.

Now, the rest of the cases use different solvers or workflow that aren't currently supported in HELYX-OS. You can either customize the run script in HELYX-OS to do all this for you or use HELYX-OS to set the basic case up for you (and mesh) and then move out of the GUI to your custom solver. Good luck!

[Seroga]

Thanks, Daniel, for your answer!

I tried to follow the steps you've mentioned but still faced a problem. Let's consider more concrete task. There is a tutorial "rhoPimpleDyFoam/annularThermalMixer" and I want to see a computational domain of this example (not especially in Helyx, any other software will suite). Would you be so kind as to tell me a detailed instruction "what to do"?

Actually, even when I try to run the tutorial with appropriate OpenFOAM command it gives me an error "Can't find file 'points' for time step 0" or smth like that, I don't remember the concrete text of the error but can give it if necessary. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.

[chegdan]

For the annularthermalMixer, did you launch the Allrun script? If you look in the script you will see that there are several steps to generate the mesh for this example. Once you have that you can view the mesh in ParaView (i.e. using paraFoam). Unfortunately, rhoPimpleDyMFoam is not currently in HELYX-OS so you are going to have to work with the command line on this one. Lastly, the error about not finding points is due to the lack of a generated mesh. Good luck.

[Seroga]

Thanks a lot! I've already understood.