In this week’s blog post, we will look into the world of pre-processing geometries for your Simcenter STAR-CCM+ simulations. The built-in CAD software 3D-CAD is a great tool for creating and preparing your fluid and solid domains before simulation. The convenience of having the underlying geometry, and all the preparation done, in the same GUI as you setup, mesh, run and post process the simulation is not something to neglect.
Apart from being a competent and userfriendly CAD program, with features any other CAD software also have, there are many reasons why to use 3D-CAD as your CAD software before running simulations in Simcenter STAR-CCM+. Some of them are:
- Ease of extracting the fluid domain from a geometry with only solid parts modelled.
- The geometry preparation can be changed and updated with just a few clicks instead of re-importing updated geometries.
- Operations in 3D-CAD are saved in the CAD tree-structure, being able to ro-order, modify or suppress the operations afterwords.
- Naming of bodies, faces and sheet bodies will follow automatically throughout the simulation.
- Dimensions can be set as parameters to be varied in design studies.
It is not possible to present all benefits and features of 3D-CAD in one blog post, but we have three videos of useful features included further down. Subtitles are included to describe the features and how to use them. We hope that these features will bring value to your simulation preparation process. Features that are presented are:
- Video 1 – leak detection tool
- Video 2 – split face by edge projection
- Video 3 – defeature faces (manually), defeature bodies (automatically), thicken
We at Volupe hope that these videos will inspire you to use 3D-CAD to its full potential, and that the features are useful in your geometry preparation. If there are any questions, please send an email to support@volupe.com.
Video 1 – leak detection tool: The leak detection tool was implemented in 3D-CAD in version 2021.1, and the tool will create a fluid or solid domain while it helps you find leaks.
Video 2 – split face by edge projection: The possibility to split faces be the projection of an edge was also implemented in version 2021.1. This feature is useful when you want to use edges for splitting surfaces when evaluating different parts of the surface individually, or doing an operation on only a part of the surface.
Video 3 – defeature faces (manually), defeature bodies (automatically), thicken: Defeaturing faces or bodies can be done both with and without automatical selection, both can be useful at different occasions. The feature to thicken a face is used for creating a solid (non-hollow geometry) based on a face. Since both fluid and solid domains are described as non-hollow geometries in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ this is a very useful feature when preparing the geometry which you are going to use in the simulation.
Author
Christoffer Johansson, M.Sc.
support@volupe.com
+46764479945
