[supermgm]

Hello all,

I'm rarely a poster on forums, but this problem has caused me to stop being a lurker and become active for once!

Basically I'm a final year Uni student current undertaking an Automotive HVAC project regarding the hydraulic efficiency of the Blower Wheels used (Centrifugal Fan). I have run numerical solutions before on the placement I did, using Fluidnexus, AcuSolve and FieldView for all my simulations. However this year I'm using STAR.

The problem is surrounding getting my CATIA V5 geometry volume meshed. When I used Fluidnexus I would simply extract the inner volumes of the geometry in CATIA, ensuring the geometry was "clean" with separate regions defining the differing boundaries of parts. So within a typical scroll with a blower wheel (In CATIA) I would boolean remove a "dumb" outline of a wheel to get a non fluid zone where I would then align the wheel around an axis as a separate body in order to assign an MRF to that region.

However I seem to be getting confused with the processes needed in order to generate a volume mesh for a blower wheel and scroll in STAR, without errors. So my questions are:

1: Should I do any boolean removals of the wheel in the scroll in STAR and not CATIA?

2: Should I perform surface repairs to the geometry? (As this seems to cause wild manipulations to my surfaces)

3: Is there a good tutorial online regarding setting up the mesh of a centrifugal fan? (I've already done the MRF tutorial within STAR, however it doesn't show you how to set up the geometry!)

I apologise if this is a stupid question, but I have been pulling my hair out the last two days; and unfortunately my University isn't being particularly helpful...

Thanks in advance.