Overview
There are several stages within the Parts-Based Meshing External Aerodynamics tutorial.
The tutorial stages are:
- Importing and visualizing the CAD parts.
Begin by launching Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and importing CAD files that contain surface meshes for the car, wing, and bounding box. Then, set up the view and hide some surfaces so that you can examine the vehicle.
- Preparing the initial surface.
Remove the original wing from the car and import a new wing that is in a different position. This action creates several problems on the geometry surface, which you fix at later stages of the tutorial.
- Filling a hole on the car surface.
Use the fill hole mesh operation to fill the hole that you introduced when you removed the original wing. This step demonstrates the process for creating a mesh operation.
- Creating a composite assembly.
One of the advantages of parts-based meshing is that you can perform mesh operations on an assembly of several parts. Create an assembly to contain the parts that you are using in this tutorial.
- Generating a wrapped surface mesh.
At this stage you generate a surface wrap of the Vehicle Assembly, which fixes the intersections in the surface mesh. You also set up curve controls and contact prevention to maintain important features on the surface mesh.
- Creating the fluid volume.
The fluid simulation requires a volume mesh between the surface of the car and the walls of the bounding box. To create the part that defines the outer surface of the volume mesh, you subtract the output of the surface wrapper operation from the bounding box.
- Assigning the fluid volume to a region.
Before generating a volume mesh, you must assign the fluid volume to a region. This action allows the mesher to convert the volume mesh to a finite volume representation that the solvers can use.
- Setting boundary types.
Certain boundary types affect the volume mesh. In this tutorial, you have a velocity inlet, pressure outlet, and symmetry boundaries that do not require prism layers.
- Generating the volume mesh.
Use an automated mesh operation to generate the volume mesh.
- Replacing the wing and executing the pipeline.
An advantage of parts-based meshing is that when you have defined the series of mesh operations, you can repeat them on different initial geometries. Here, you replace the wing component and run the meshing pipeline to generate a new volume mesh.