CFD Analysis of a Smoking Pipe | Part 3 | Surface Triangulation ∇ OpenFOAM® v8
Channel: Holzmann CFD
Date: 2020-08-29

Hey Foam'er, let us go on with the training session - still not with OpenFOAM but we are getting closer. In the following training video, one will get the idea of how to create the surface files for snappyHexMesh. 



During the video, I am going to tell you the differences between the simple exported triangulated surfaces of common CAD systems and the extended triangulation strategy he is commonly using.


The triangulation of the surfaces is a main key for the mesh generation, especially if one is using the OpenFOAM meshing application named »snappyHexMesh«. Probably, this pre-processing step is also helpful to create good meshes using cfMesh too. However, Tobias does not have any experience with cfMesh and hence, it is just a guess.

An interesting point that should be noted here is, that ANSYS Fluent is doing a similar approach while creating polyhedral meshes. Therefore, one can imagine that the surface triangulation is an important step. 

The video topics are as follows:
- exporting STL files from the Geometry module (similar to a common CAD export)
- Extended surface triangulation
- Exporting the single named triangulated surfaces
- Giving information about the general file structure of an STL file (a reference to József Nagy's video is given)
- Combining the single STL files to a region STL file
- Analyzing the STL's in ParaView

Hopefully, you take some new ideas out of the video and share it with the community. I hope that you give value to the time I spend on creating videos for the community. Leave a comment.

Further information and training cases are presented on https://Holzmann-cfd.com


Enjoy and keep foaming,
Tobias