I am attempting to mesh a complicated design (~80,000 faces) for a microchannel heat sink, as pictured, and I would appreciate some advice. I have tried a range of different mesh controls (especially face sizing and body sizing), mesh settings and element sizes, and all have failed to produce a working mesh. The most common errors are shown in the linked picture, in particular the one regarding "The following surfaces cannot be meshed with acceptable quality. Try using a different element size or virtual topology." However, I have already reduced the element size to 2x10^-6 m, which takes two days to resolve before failure.
Unfortunately I cannot alter the geometry significantly, as it is imported from generation in SolidWORKS as either a STEP or an x.t file. As such, any advice for how I can successfully mesh the geometry for CFD analysis in FLUENT would be greatly appreciated.
I can provide more details or the geometry file itself if required.
Thanks in advance.
Meshing Attempt
Probably your cad design is not clean at all. But it is impossible to notice from this image. If you don't have control over the geometry source it is trouble. Because you might ask somebody else about check and fix something. First check you can do with your model it's trying to reduce the number of elements until the minimum possible value. Then if the mesh runs properly you can relay in the surfaces of your cad model. After that, you can refine the mesh, but the refining process is something that you have to do following some error criteria. If you are also the designer why not try to simplify a bit the geometry if you consider it is really hard to mesh? Meshing properly is a hard task, you should go step-by-step until you reach some solution. Also, you must not allow the preprocessor mesh automatically, without giving some criteria. Probably the first thing you have to answer even before apply any mesh is, what is your Reynolds number? And what is the most valuable result in which you can base the goodness of your discretization?
Thank you for your suggestions. In the end I solved the issue by importing the original mesh generated by COMSOL into SpaceClaim, then employing both the "Smooth" and "Reduce Faces" tools in tandem to simplify the geometry, before finally using SolidWORKS to turn the smoothed mesh into a solid body. This body retained many of the same features as the original, but was much less complex, having two orders of magnitude fewer faces. In turn, this permitted both meshing and heat transfer analysis in FLUENT.
Related
I am using make_mesh_3 to mesh implicit functions. However, for some models it fails to generate a mesh at all.
For one of the circumstances it fails I assume it is because the mesh generator does not construct a good enough initial set of points. For this instance I am hoping that increasing the number of rays shoot in random directions or changing the point from which they are shot (by default the center of the bounding box) may help alleviate the problem. Is there a way without changing the source code of CGAL to specify the number of rays to shoot and the point from which they are shot?
The other circumstance under which it seems to fail regularly is when the volume becomes very thin. Is there any way to keep this from happening?
I am currently learning how to sculpt in Blender; working on my own projects after completing BlenderGuru's Beginner & Intermediate classes, and some of Grant Abbitts videos with pleasing results. I am trying to sculpt a plasmapistol with a skull on it, which can be seen in the reference photo that I have provided.
However, when I sculpt, I get these really odd linear artefacts (See picture below, circled in black). I added a Subsurf Modifier to the primitive UV Sphere, with the Viewport and Render Values set to 4, so it is a fairly fine mesh. However, these still artefacts occur.
I assume it is due to the stretching of the polygons when I grab the sphere with the Snake Hook tool and deform it to encompass the frontal part of the skull.
EDIT: Whilst writing this comment I went back, and switched on Dynamic Topology with Relative Detail selected.
It appears that I am no longer getting the issues that I was getting last night with the linear artefacts.
Can I confirm that these problems are a result of having the incorrect Dynamic Topology settings for using the Snake Hook Tool; I was using Constant Detail instead of Relative Detail, or is this being caused by another issue?
Also, any advice on avoiding common pitfalls when choosing the settings in sculpting would be most appreciated.
I will continue to ask this question incase anyone has a similar problem and it can be resolved by reading this.
Sculpt, showing lineations
Experimenting with Dynamic Topology
In Object Mode, does the object have uniform X, Y, & Z scaling? If not, you can apply the scale from the object menu.
Object ‣ Apply ‣ Scale / Rotation & Scale
I am using OpenCascade to import STEP/IGES as meshes in my software. Works nicely.
But I need small triangles, and the one I get are sometimes very large (in flat area), or very elongated (eg. when meshing a cylinder). The best would be to split triangle's edge bigger than some absolute value. Avoiding T vertices, too.
I was'nt able to google anything about that... So, currently, I pass the mesh to OpenMesh, apply the OpenMesh::Subdivider::Uniform::LongestEdgeT operator, then pass it back to my software. Tedious and costly when I manage several M triangles...
Questions:
Is there an equivalent in OpenCascade ?
Or a simple code snipet to implement my own loop to do so ?
Thanks !
The meshing algorithm BRepMesh_IncrementalMesh coming with Open CASCADE Technology is mainly focused on two usage scenarios:
Visualization in 3D Viewer. Large and prolonged triangles make no harm to presentation, as vertex normals ensure proper smooth shading. Deflection parameters allows managing presentation quality.
Computing Algorithms using triangulation as approximation (to speed up calculations compared to the same algorithm working on exact geometry). In this case, deflection parameters determine the target precision of the algorithm. Large and prolonged triangles should not cause problems here, as deviation from exact geometry is controlled by meshing parameters.
There are, however, some categories of algorithms, where shape of mesh element is very important. Solvers (numerical simulation) make one of such categories, where unfortunate mesh elements may cause numerical instability or other issues. What exactly matters / cause issues depend on specific algorithm - this may include element skewness, element aspect ratio, element size and elements grid. Some solvers work much better on quads rather than on triangles.
If you take a look onto meshing result of BRepMesh_IncrementalMesh algorithm, you may notice that not only large prolonged triangles, but entire mesh structure is somewhat suboptimal for solver algorithms:
There are several options you may consider:
Triangulation refinement algorithm. Such algorithm processes existing triangulation and tries healing some properties like skewness. This what does OpenMesh from your question, I suppose. Such postprocessing algorithm might give satisfactory results at good performance, but final result will dramatically depend on properties of original meshing algorithm. For the moment, OCCT doesn't have any refinement tool, although it is possible writing such algorithm on your own (I cannot give you a small code snippet, because such algorithm is not that small an trivial as it may look from a first glance).
Consider alternative meshing algorithm. Probably incomplete list:
Express Mesh by Open Cascade (hence, working directly on OCCT shapes). This tool generates triangulation having nice grid-alike structure (for smooth surfaces), configurable element size and quad-dominant generation option. This is a commercial product though.
Netgen mesher. This open source tool provides bindings to OCCT, and although it is focused on 3D tetrahedral mesh generation, it may be also used for generating a common triangular mesh. I cannot say something good about this tool - it was rather slow and unstable when I've seen its work many years ago.
MeshGems surface meshing. Another commercial tool providing an interface to OCCT. Never worked with this product, so cannot share any opinion on it.
Consider improving BRepMesh_IncrementalMesh. As OCCT is an open source framework, you may consider extending its meshing algorithm with more parameters and contribute to the project.
I'm new to CGAL and I'm trying to cut a cube with an arbitrary surface mesh in 3d (no self intersections, not closed/no volume). The goal is to get a volume which consists of one "side" of the cut cube, closed by the part of the surface inside the cube.
The surface itself consists of unordered triangles which should have the same winding order (consistent normal directions) but have no neighborhood information and could contain same points multiple times for different triangles.
I tried to use the clip function, like:
CGAL::Polygon_mesh_processing::clip(cube,surface,true);
Which of course does not work because the surface is not closed (as far as I understood). But It shows the idea on how the operation should work.
Boolean operations (https://doc.cgal.org/latest/Polygon_mesh_processing/index.html#title14)) cannot be used for this as well since they are calculated on volumes and the surface has no volume.
I also thought about extending the outside of the surface so that it is closed. This, however, does not seem like a good approach.
Sadly, my research on similar problems was not successful.
I'm pretty sure that there is a nice way to do this in CGAL. Maybe someone with more experience in CGAL knows how to do this.
What would be the best approach for getting this volume?
Regards
EDIT:
By removing redundant points in my surface mesh I was able to get clip to work. Nevertheless, I do not always get the right side of the volume, even though the winding order should yield normals which point to the outside.
Is it necessary to calculate the normals and pass them as an extra parameter (see here) of the surface before the cut in order to always get the same "inner" side of the volume?
Also, the clip function seems to be quite slow. I have to do this cut for a very high number of cubes and different surfaces.
I use CGAL as header only lib and without GMP and MPFR, since it crashed my other application. How big is the speedup using these libraries and are there any other tricks which can be used to speedup computation, e.g. using parallelization?
I saw that CGAL uses Intel's TBB which. But in the header files which are included by the clipping algorithm CGAL_LINKED_WITH_TBB is not tested.
Thanks
It was a problem with the clipping mesh. Clipping could not be done properly. I increased it size and now it always intersects the volume.
I tried executing the example in http://doc.cgal.org/latest/Surface_mesh_skeletonization/index.html to get the skeleton of a surface mesh.
I tried using a mesh model of blood vessels with thin structures. However, no matter how refined my meshes are, parts of the skeletons seems to always be outside the mesh models.
In the sample code, there seems to be no parameters which I am able to play around with, so I am asking if there is anything i can do to make sure the skeleton stays within the mesh model.
I have tried to refined the meshes, till the program crashes. Thanks for any help provided. thanks!
I guess you have used the free function setting all parameters to their default. In case you want to tune the parameters you need to use the class Mean_curvature_flow_skeletonization.
It has 3 parameters that need to be fine tuned so that your skeleton lies within the mesh:
quality_speed_tradeoff
medially_centered_speed_tradeoff
is_medially_centered
Note that the polyhedron demo includes a plugin where you can try the effect of the different parameters.
If you can share the mesh with me, I can also have a look.