Feature Articles: A Publication For ANSYS Users
Feature Articles: A Publication For ANSYS Users
Feature Articles: A Publication For ANSYS Users
Contents
Contents
Feature Articles
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Figure 2
Workbench allows the concatenation of surfaces into virtual cells, which can be used in the
sweeping process. The top of Figure 2 shows the original surfaces and the resulting virtual cell.
The Preview Sweep view highlights all the sweepable volumes in green, as in the bottom of
Figure 2. This is very handy since you can see what needs to be changed before you actually try
to mesh the model.
Figure 3
Now that the volumes are sweepable, it does not mean that they will get meshed with all hexes.
The first time I meshed this geometry, Workbench put wedges in around the hole and nothing that
I tried would get them out. You can specify a mapped mesh on an area, but that did not work
because of the hole. I also tried specifying the element size in the hole, but that still did not
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 4 shows the final blocking structure for the first geometry case. This structure took four
slices and two special features called O-grids. The X-shaped cuts around the hole are created with
a single O-grid command, and allow the mesh to be perpendicular around the hole. The second
O-grid follows the L-shape of the block, and creates orthogonal elements along the fillet. The
element sizes can be taken from the geometry, or controlled specifically on each edge of the
blocks. The structured mesh format ensures that the mesh is consistent throughout the model. The
blocking structure is saved to a separate file, which can then be used again on other parts with
similar topology. This can be a big time savings for companies that make similar components for
different systems.
Figure 6
AI*Environment also has an abundance of mesh editing tools and quality checks. You can delete
elements, merge or move nodes, smooth the mesh, and even build automatic transitions from a
fine to coarse mesh as shown in Figure 6. The first three of these, and many more, can be done on
any mesh imported from one of more than ten available formats. [I brought in the original
Workbench mesh and removed the wedges, just because I could.] When your mesh is ready, you
can output to more that one hundred different solvers.
Below is a head-to-head comparison of the three geometry cases meshed on each of the different
ANSYS packages. For a mesh quality comparison, all the meshes were brought into
AI*Environment for quality checks, with 1.0 being a perfect orthogonal hex element. In each
case, a global element size of .1 was used for the 1 x 1 inch block, along with the default
settings for everything else. I recorded the time it took to get an all-hex mesh, since ANSYS and
Workbench may produce wedges.
As you can see, only AI*Environment was able to mesh all three cases easily. Although it took
longer to mesh Case 1 in AI*Environment than in Workbench, the time savings is recovered by
using the same blocking file for Case 2, and the quality is also higher with AI*Environment in all
cases. The blocking only changed slightly in Case 3, since a change in the O-grid configuration
was needed to accommodate the tangency to the wall.
You should always consider your tools depending on the job that you need to do. If you think of
the job of hex meshing as a screw, you can think of the three packages as screwdrivers. ANSYS
is the standard flat-head screwdriver. It works well for most projects, but sometimes you just need
something else. ANSYS Workbench would be the handy reversible screwdriver that has both flat
and Phillips heads when one just wont do. And finally, there is AI*Environment. You can
compare it to the little screwdriver that comes on the giant Swiss Army knife you see in the
window at the knife shop. It may seem little cumbersome at first, but once you get used to it, you
also have all those other tools to help take care of any job.
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Contributor Information
Please dont hesitate to send in a contribution! Articles and information helpful to
ANSYS users are very much welcomed and appreciated. We encourage you to
send your contributions via e-mail to Rod Scholl.
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