Surface Wrapper: Intake Manifold

This tutorial demonstrates how to use the surface wrapper to extract the internal fluid surface from a collection of parts that represent an intake manifold assembly.

The surface wrapper is run several times to present the general iterative nature of the tool when dealing with new or unfamiliar geometries. With each iteration, additional features and options are included to improve the overall fidelity of the resultant wrapped surface. With experience, you can utilize the surface wrapper and get the desired result in one or two iterations.

The geometry is shown below:

The manifold assembly is composed of several parts, including the main body, mounting struts, air-flow sensor, control valve, and directional flow baffles. Most parts are in their original CAD form and have not been prepared for use in a CFD analysis.

For a simple case with only a few parts, manual repair to remove unwanted surfaces and stitch together remaining ones to form a closed volume geometry, is a realistic solution. As the number of parts and overall complexity increases, however, manual repair becomes inefficient. Instead, use the surface wrapper to extract a high-fidelity representation of the geometry. Use the representation in the surface remesher to obtain a high-quality triangulation from which the volume meshing tools can proceed.

The issues that the surface wrapper deals with in this example are:

  • Material thickness
  • Open flow boundaries
  • Disconnected geometry/flanges
  • Overlaps/double surfaces
  • Intersecting bodies (struts)
  • Surface holes
  • Channels
  • Internal thin wall baffles
  • Close proximity bodies (valve, sensor)
These issues are illustrated in the cut-away diagram below:

The surface wrapper can be a fast and efficient process of extracting both internal and external surfaces from CAD type geometries. Successful use of the wrapper requires practice, due to the numerous paths available. For example, tweaking some of the basic input values to deal with a particular feature can sometime have a significant effect on the overall result. Repeated use of the wrapper however builds up a wealth of experience.