Which meshing tool are you using for your CFD calculation? Which CFD Programm are you using?
OpenFOAM and ANSYS are complex software with sophisticated CFD tools for various flow regimes, but they require skillful meshing and modelling for obtaining accurate results. SolidWorks Flow Simulation also is a good choice based on k-epsilon turbulence model, penalty of which is the considerably reduced accuracy while analyzing largely multi-edged geometries at turbulent regimes.
Hi;
In my idea, although OpenFOAM is open source, it has shown some deficiencies in dynamic meshes. Gambit and ICEM are good candidates but you have to determine every detail even in simple problems (for instance, the size of mesh in the case of boundary layer). However, COMSOL can easily mesh the geometry and lower the size of meshes near the edges and the wall.
Among the CFD programs, I think the future belongs to CONVERGE. Although COMSOL is a suitable program for multi-physics problems, it is not appropriate in some turbulence problems. Overall, for the special cases of turbulence the proper choice is CFX and CONVERGE, while COMSOL is the best option for most of the problems.
Hello Lukas,
It depends on your required mesh complexity. However, I use the open source SALOME software, http://www.salome-platform.org/
I would also suggest ANSA as a commercial software if you have access to it. https://www.beta-cae.com/ansa.htm
I hope this helps
Best regards
Hayder
It depends on your requirements. All the available commercial packages have their own meshing package. I think ICEM gives a decent grid. Pointwise can generate high quality grids but the time requirement is high. ICEM is more easy to learn than pointwise. So you see it’s very hard to pinpoint one grid generator that is best!
There are many softwares available:
ANSYS, Comsol, Abaqus, Nastran, Autodesk Simulation, LS-Dyna, Simscale.
ANSYS is best among them.
I think with ANSYS and GAMBIT you could solve all your problems. The problem with them is that they are commercial softwares.
If you wish to use free software, OpenFOAM would be a good choice.
Hi Lucas, I am using Siemens STAR-CCM+. It's the best commercial CFD tool for most applications at the moment.
Meshing is integrated within STAR-CCM+.
You can use any mesh settings as a parameter in the optimisation tool to do mesh sensitivity studies. When you need to adjust your y+ after an initial run, it's a 10 sec process within STAR-CCM+: change the thickness of your first cell, click mesh and click run.
It's used by almost all the largest CFD users in the world. See the attached slide by Siemens CEO when Siemens announced they bought it in 2016.
STAR-CCM+ academic licenses are very cheap. If you don't want to reinvent the wheel and focus on your research, I would strongly recommend it. Feel free to contact me directly if you want more details.
if you are using the softawares like Fluent , you could use ICEM or Gambit . but if you are interested in opensource softwares like OpenFoam , you could use ICEM or Gambit too , but some of the professional toolboxes like snappyHex Mesh .
Depends on what you actually want to do. For a fast unstructered mesh generation I can also recommend StarCCM+. The mesh generation process is highly automated and gives you good results also for very complex geometries. It includes hexahedral cut cell approaches, polyhedral meshes and tetrahedral meshes along with more specific mesh approaches like direct meshing. The algorithm works in parallel and is very fast. I often create meshes in the order of about 50-60 million hexahedral cells on a 28 core workstation in about 15 minutes.
It cannot produce any structured meshes so if you want to go that way for simpler geometries I can recommend PointWise.
Unstructured meshes: Star CCM+
Structured meshes: GridPro, Pointwise or SnappyHexMesh (OpenFoam software)
Hi,
for working with OpenFOAM (open source CFD software), our favourite meshing tool is GMSH, which has given us very satisfactory results in many research projects.
Sincerely,
Jose
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