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0 ANSYS Meshing
Duraivelan Dakshinamoorthy
Sr. Technical Services Engineer
ANSYS Houston
1 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
ANSYS Service Pack 14.0.1
Service pack R14.0 Pre‐Load (R14.0.1)
available on ANSYS Customer Portal, in Software download area)
Bug in 14.0 (“QA WB2012‐01”):
Description of Error
Under some circumstances, the database for a Mechanical or Mesh system (e.g., SYS.mechdb
and SYS.mshdb, respectively) can become permanently damaged upon saving a Workbench
Project file. A damaged database will display an unusual file size of 20KB. Attempts to open or
edit it will yield errors such as:
"Unable to open file" "Unable set unit system for geometry"
"Unable to set generate input file. Unable to get environment"
"Unable to obtain linked environment IDs. Unable to get model"
Suggested User Action For Running in R14.0
To prevent the error, disable the options to Pre‐Load the Mechanical and Mesh Editors in
Workbench via:
Tools > Options > Mechanical > Pre‐Load the Mechanical Editor
Tools > Options > Meshing > Pre‐Load the Meshing Editor
2 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
ANSYS 14.0 Meshing Goals
Rapid Meshing of Assemblies:
• Reduce time spent in CAD & Meshing
– Improved handling of complicated geometries
– Extract flow volume during meshing
General Improvements in Meshing Process:
• Improved meshing algorithms:
– Hybrid (hex/tet) meshing
– Shell meshing
• Improved process & flexibility
• Improved robustness
• Improved speed
3 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Overview:
ANSYS Meshing Application:
Assembly Meshing:
• What is it? How will it help?
• Technical overview
General Meshing Improvements:
• Example Benefits
• Technical overview
ANSYS ICEM CFD:
Technical overview
ANSYS TGrid:
Technical overview
4 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing
5 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing
Assembly meshing is a top‐down meshing approach to mesh all parts at 1 time:
• Use of virtual bodies (material points) to extract flow regions from dirty geometry
• Support for:
– Meshing solids from sheet bodies
– Conformal mesh between parts w/out having multibody parts
– Support for overlapping bodies
Assembly
Handling face-
edge
connectivity
Capping
Face
Material
point
6 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Characteristics
• Assembly meshing replaces 13.0 CutCell Meshing at the GUI level
• Supports both CutCell and Tetrahedral meshes
• CutCell meshing maintains characteristics from 13.0
– High fraction of hex and prismatic cells
– Supports global size functions, feature capture, tessellation, etc. controls
– Operates on parts, multi‐body parts, etc. with new option to define virtual bodies
– Patch independent:
• Eliminates the need for pinch control and VT operations
• Creates conformal meshes
across parts in contact
– Eliminates the need for multi‐body part generation in CAD
• Ability to create flow volumes from
a “closed” set of bodies (sheet or solid)
– Eliminates the need for Boolean/Fill operations in CAD
7 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Notes
• CutCell: still Polyhedra upon Export
– No support for CFX solver
– No option to export non‐polyhedra meshes (except from TGrid)
• Tetrahedron: only integrated with Fluent
– Produces Linear Tets, not suitable for Mechanical solvers
– For CFX (unsupported work‐around):
• Set Physics to Fluent
• export the mesh in Fluent format
• Import mesh into a CFX system
• Ability to create flow volumes from:
– A “closed” void bounded by
• solids and capping surface
• Fluid surfaces
• The above, fully enclosed in a fluid volume
8 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Flow Volume Extraction
1. Define Coordinate system inside
the Fluid Void
2. Insert a Virtual body
3. Assign the proper Coordinate
System to the Material Point in
the details of the Virtual Body
4. Done
#2
#3
#1
9 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Keep Solid Mesh
In the Assembly Meshing panel, you can choose to
keep or discard the mesh in all solids
Parts can be marked
as Fluids/Solids
10 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Inflation Improvements
Speed and Flexibility of inflation: Industrial Example:
• 68 Million cells, 5 inflation layers
• Several improvements to both • Total Mesh Time:
assembly and part meshing •R13: 6 hrs 39 mins
– Better quality during stair stepping •R14: 3 hrs 38 mins
– Better handling of high aspect ratio inflation
– Improved speed of inflation creation ~30‐100%
• Assembly Meshing Flexibility
– CutCell: Full support of 2‐stage inflation
• CutCell and inflation in two separate steps
– Within the working session
– Tetrahedron: Uses pre‐inflation
• Faster, more layers, and better quality
11 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Automatic Inflation
Also supported for Virtual Bodies
• Program controlled inflation acts only on Fluid Bodies
12 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Sharp Angle Tool
• A special cell cutting algorithm has been developed to
properly capture sharp 3D angles
• Can be used to improve feature capturing in general
• Insert a “Sharp Angle” and pick adjacent faces
• Example: Mesh without Sharp Angle
13 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing Leak Handling:
Leakage Path
Find leaks using material points:
• Any time you are using material points (for internal flow), and it is
leaking to the outside, you can automatically see the
leak‐path together with the surface mesh
There is a small gap between the valve plug and the valve seat
14 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing Leak Handling:
Contact (Interface) Regions
Using Contacts for Assembly meshing:
• Workbench has extensive capabilities to detect contact
(interfaces) between parts.
• Until now, that contact information has been of little use to
FLUENT users, but that has changed at 14.0
• Contacts have several purposes for
Assembly Meshing:
– Closing of small gaps using contact sizing
– Find thin sections
– Find Contacts For example, in this image
• Features at contact pairs are preserved the circled edges would be
removed without contact
• Contacts are also used in Fluid Surface defined since the feature
picker helper angle is below the default
(40 degrees)
15 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing Leak Handling:
Closing Leaks up to 1/5 of min size
Pick the face of the valve plug (blue)
Contact sizing: Three simple steps and the edge of the valve seat (red)
1. Insert a Face‐Face Contact between
the entities that are leaking
– Face/Face or Face/Edge
2. Drag and drop the contact
#1
on top of the Mesh Icon
– Creates a Contact sizing
3. Adjust Contact sizing
– Should be bigger than the gap
• Limited to gaps up to 1/5 of min‐size
4. Generate Mesh
#2
#3
16 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Finding Thin Sections
Why locate thin sections (3D bodies)?
• Avoid Leakage
• The assembly meshing method produces better quality
meshes if thin baffles and fins are well resolved
• By using the Find Thin Sections tool, these can be found
in advance and appropriate sizing can be applied
17 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Fluid Surfaces
Creating Fluid Surfaces for Flow Volume meshing
• Description
– Pick all faces that make up the wetted surface
of the flow volume
• Applications
– Mainly used when only flow volume is needed
• No conjugate heat transfer
• Advantage
– Faster
– Less memory
– Reduction of leakages
• Approach
– Insert Virtual Body
– Insert Fluid Surface (select faces)
18 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Fluid Surfaces
• To manually select all the faces making up all the flow volume
is in many assemblies too time consuming
– To help out with this task,
we have added a new picker helper:
Extend to Connection!
• To use this, you need to have
proper connections defined
– Connections are created
automatically in WB, so to start with:
delete all the old connections !
• Create New Connections
– Make sure min‐size is properly set !
– RMB – Find Contacts
19 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Fluid Surfaces
• Start by picking all capping faces
– Use the Tree to confirm the number
of capping faces (Surface Bodies)
– In big models, hide all 3D‐bodies !
• Select faces in the fluid region
away from contacts
– Extend to connections, does not work
if the face is already in “contact”
20 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Fluid Surfaces
• The extend to connection will help, but usually not pick all remaining
faces
• In this case, two faces
are missing
• In total 136 faces were
picked using about 10
manual picks
• Are we sure that all the
faces are picked?
– If not, meshing will leak
21 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Fluid Surfaces
• To see missing faces, hide all bodies and look
at the picked faces in the mesh group
• Faces could extend outside the flow volume
• Note: Fluid Surfaces will ignore baffles
• Resulting mesh:
22 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Assembly Meshing: Miscellaneous Features
• Size Function improvements
– Separate Min size for Curvature
and Proximity
– Less mesh clustering
– Support for Body of Influence
• “Mesh Unite” Fluid or Solid
bodies using Mesh Groups
– Improve quality of the mesh by releasing geometry
constraints at interfaces
23 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
General Meshing
Improvements
24 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
General Meshing Improvements
Key Technology Areas:
• Selective Meshing Worksheet
• Virtual Topologies
• Hex Meshing
• Tet Meshing
• Shell Meshing
• Mesh Connections
• Contacts for Fluent
25 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Selective Meshing Worksheet
• Controls order of body meshing:
– Allows selective body meshing to remain persistent
– User can record meshing operations, or add steps manually
For Example: User
wants an all hex
mesh on quarter
piston model
Due to complexity in
meshing, user may
want to control
sequence of meshing
steps
If recording, steps will
be automatically
created.
26 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Selective Meshing Worksheet: Recording
Meshing steps relate to Named Selection:
– When recording, named selections are created for user
For example, if recording meshing steps,
and user meshes 1 body:
1. Step will be added to Worksheet
2. Named selection will automatically be
created #2
3. Step will not be included in output to
solver unless “Send to Solver” is
changed to “Yes’
#3
#1
27 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Selective Meshing Worksheet: Manual
User can also manually create meshing steps, w/out mesh having to
be computed:
1. Create Named Selection with bodies to be meshed in that step
– Set “Send to Solver” option to “No”
2. In Worksheet, RMB and select Add and then select the Named
Selection you created in Step #1
28 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Selective Meshing Worksheet: Editing
When meshing, if the order in Worksheet needs to be
adjusted, this can be done in 1 of several ways:
1. Add, Delete steps
2. Change Contents
of Named Selection
29 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Selective Meshing Worksheet: Strategy
If meshing a complicated model, use a strategy
that allows flexibility. For example:
30 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Selective Meshing Worksheet:
Use of Inactive steps
– Meshing steps can be made active or
inactive
• In this case, after meshing middle
and top piston sections, make top
section’s steps inactive before
meshing bottom sections. This will
improve performance and
flexibility.
– If while working, user needs to
change order of meshing, steps can
be modified by changing contents of
named selections
• Named selections can contain 1
body or multiple bodies.
• Use additional inactive steps for
greater flexibility.
31 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Selective Meshing Worksheet
Generate Mesh:
– Steps in worksheet are only necessary when user control is required.
– Bodies that are not in Worksheet are meshed after Worksheet steps
are completed.
– User can step through selective meshing steps by using
RMBGenerate Mesh Through This Step
32 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies
Improved automation, flexibility, and usability:
– More interactive usage through direct graphics
interaction rather than tree objects
– Ability to run “Auto VT” on selected edges, faces or
bodies
– Clustering of faces/edges
– Create hard vertex
– Face splits
– Interactive editing
33 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies: Interactive editing
Tree view is replaced with graphical selections:
Select objects and RMBOperate, or use icon palette to:
– Merge Edges or Faces
– Split Edges or Faces
– Create Hard Vertex
– Shuffle through VTs (order depicts order of creation)
– Edit VTs to see VT options
– Delete
Virtual Topology Detail View:
– Global behavior
– Statistics view added
34 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies: Interactive editing
Face Clustering:
Cluster 2
Cluster 1
Auto‐VT on selection:
• In similar fashion user can select group of faces, or bodies and generate auto‐VT on this
selection.
Delete, Edit, etc. also work on multiple selection sets
35 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies: VT Hard Vertex
Create VT Hard Vertex:
• Pick on face, screen selection point is where vertex will be created:
36 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies: Edge splits
Create VT edge splits:
• Pick on edge, screen selection point will be used to split the edge
Repeat for other 2
37 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies: Face splits
Create VT face splits from vertex pairs:
• Select 2 vertices and split face
Repeat for other 2
38 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies: Example: Blunt body
Flexibility: Allows user to get mapped or swept mesh for non‐
mappable/non‐sweepable bodies
39 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies: Interactively edit splits
40 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies: Notes
• When legacy models are read into 14.0, the objects are
removed from the tree, but user can access the VTs
interactively from graphics
• Use Arrow keys to shuffle through VTs in graphics
similar to how users shuffled through objects in tree in past
• Suppressed VTs are no longer supported: upon legacy import
suppressed VTs not attached to a suppressed object are
deleted (w/warning given)
41 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies:
Example: Intersecting Pipes
Use Virtual Splits for hex meshing
42 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topologies:
Example: Automotive component
43 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Virtual Topology: Quarter Piston
44 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Hex Meshing
Robustness Improvements:
– MultiZone, Sweep and Thin Sweep
– Improved case handling for MultiZone
MultiZone improvements:
– Performance improvements
– Support for match mesh control
– All Prisms option
45 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
MultiZone: Robustness improvements
Support for:
• Handling of cylindrical
side faces
• Imprinting
– Through bodies
– Through long stretches of
connected side faces
– Through side faces
– General improvements
• Support for edge splits
46 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
MultiZone: Mesh Matching
Added Support for Mesh Matching:
– Cyclic/Periodic Symmetry and/or match mesh control
47 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
MultiZone: Performance Improvements
Speed Improvements:
– Better performance for swept blocks
– Improved multibody part handling
14:24
12:00
9:36
7:12
4:48
2:24
0:00
12.1 13.0 14.0
48 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Tet Meshing
• Robustness and Quality improvements in tri surface meshing, inflation
and tet meshing
• Separated Min Size for Curvature and Proximity
• Added new option for Advancing Front Triangle Surface Meshing
Program Controlled: Default, mesher determines approach by surface type, face topology and defeatured boundaries.
Advancing Front: Mesher uses Adv. Front unless it fails, then it falls back to other approaches.
49 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Connections for Fluent
• In 14.0, information in the contact folder will be written as mesh
interfaces for Fluent
• If you have contacts/connections in an old database, The user is asked to
remove the contact information
• A new WB option to NOT generate contacts automatically is available
50 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Connections for Fluent
• Start Workbench and open ToolsOptions
• Go to Either Meshing or Mechanical
• Unselect “Auto Detect Contact on Attach”
51 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
ANSYS ICEM CFD 14.0 Update
Productivity enhancements through increased
robustness, flexibility, and efficiency
• Over 200 defects and feature requests
resolved
• User interface
– Selection and Display Enhancements
– Model tree enhancements
– Enhanced Subsets
• Mesh Editing
– Enhanced Prism editing, refinement, etc.
• Output
– Enhanced output to CGNS, ANSYS FLUENT
52 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
TGrid 14.0 Update
Driven by Assembly meshing technology
exposed in ANSYS Meshing
• Assembly Meshing features
– Material points
• /mesh/cutcell/set/create‐material‐points
– Sharp angle and feature capturing
• /mesh/cutcell/set/set‐thin‐cut‐faces
• /mesh/cutcell/set/set‐thin‐cut‐edges
– Leak path, CutCell‐to‐Tet conversion, etc.
• Prism speedup (~2x)
• Defect fixing
– Wrapper, CutCell, surface meshing, tet meshing,
topology handling, prisms, etc.
• Updated wrapper templates
– Contact support for latest version, tutorials
53 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Summary:
• 14.0 provides many improvements focusing on robustness, automation,
persistence, and flexibility in meshing solutions
• Assembly meshing provides a top down meshing solution that caters to
more complex models
• Selective part/body meshing allows for greater flexibility to control the
mesh quality
• We continue to advance Extended meshing solutions and technologies
54 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012
Questions?
55 © 2011 ANSYS, Inc. March 16, 2012