Tips & Tricks

Materials in the database - Which material properties to use with respect to the three methods to simulate the heat effects of welding

A material is described with exactly one set of material properties. In simulation engineering - depending on the applied method and the moment in time when the simulation is carried out in the product development cycle - only subsets of a full material data set might be required. In this article is outlined which subset is used for which purpose, what is available in the database, and what can be simulated.

The challenge of simulating casting and heat treatment

Foundries that have implemented casting simulation to shorten development time, further wish to use simulation in order to reduce the cost of subsequent processing steps. This often requires the simulation of heat treatment.

Grouping parts during data import in CFD-VisCART

When dealing with complex industrial models such as cars and airplanes, hundreds of parts need to be managed. Each one of these parts may also be subdivided into different components. In order to easily manipulate these different parts and components in CFD-VisCART, you can make use of the grouping feature.

CFD-VisCART: Mesh Extrusion

In most CFD simulations, it is required to place inlets/outlets far enough from the region of interest in order to reduce their influence on the solution. In many applications, this can be done by extruding existing inlets/outlets BC patches away from the domain.

Preserving boundaries between patches with CFD-VisCART’s Single Domain mesher

The ‘Preserve Features’ option does very well in preserving features between geometry patches – as long as the patches are not coplanar (dihedral angle = 0) or include a very small dihedral angle between them.

CFD-VisCART: Suppression of parts for mesh generation

When performing an analysis comparing component A versus component B, it is useful to have both components stored in the same file for physical comparison and documentation purposes. However, when generating the mesh for the analysis, only one of the parts should be considered at a time. The "Suppress" option in CFD-VisCART makes this possible.

Boundary Layer meshing in CFD-VisCART

In order to accurately capture flow field characteristics, a fine mesh near boundary walls is often needed. This is commonly referred to as the Boundary Layer mesh or simply, Boundary Layers. When dealing with structured meshes, one would cluster grid points near specific boundaries before building mesh faces and blocks. But for an automated mesher, dedicated algorithms are needed to generate boundary layer cells. Both CFD-GEOM and CFD-VisCART are capable of generating boundary layer meshes, and they share the same core algorithm.

"Preserve Feature" option in CFD-VisCART

When dealing with the multi-domain mesher in CFD-VisCART, the ‘Preserve Feature’ option can help you get a mesh that closely follow the original geometry. The meshing algorithm controls the refinement based on the detected ‘Critical Features’ or ‘Outlines’. Therefore, it is very important to detect critical features and outlines prior to mesh generation.

Local cell size control option in CFD-VisCART

It is often necessary to refine or coarsen the mesh in some regions of your model, whether it be to allow the solver to correctly capture gradients of variables (refinement), or reduce the mesh density in some areas to lower the total cell count. In CFD-VisCART, there are many options that enable local mesh refinement.

Surface mesh coarsening option for Shrink-Wrapped meshes

When generating a shrink-wrapped surface mesh, one could end up with a large number of faces (triangles) in an attempt to capture small features. The Mesh Decimation tool in CFD-VisCART allows the user to reduce the number of faces without losing features preserved during the skrink-wrapping process.