General Workflow

The following is a general guideline for CFD modeling.

Cleanup/defeaturing

After importing the geometry into Engineering Solutions, it is necessary to perform a cleanup and defeaturing step. Corrupted surfaces are repaired or replaced and geometrical features with no influence on the flow field are suppressed to ease the meshing process and ensure good surface element quality.

Surface meshing

Choose an appropriate surface meshing algorithm, for example “surface deviation” or “size and bias”, and generate a shell mesh on the geometry. The quality of the surface shell mesh has a direct impact on the final volume mesh. Therefore it is important to check/improve the element quality of the surface mesh before the volume mesh is generated, for example with “check elem”. Make sure that no free edges are available in shell mesh.

Volume meshing

Based on the surface mesh, generate a volume grid with an appropriate meshing algorithm, for example “CFD tetramesh”. Similar to the pervious step, it is important to check the element quality and improve it if necessary.

Prepare the model for export

To achieve a good compatibility between Engineering Solutions and the CFD solver, it is recommended to organize the mesh in a certain way before exporting.

Export the mesh for a CFD solver

Export the mesh in a one of the available CFD solver formats.