To celebrate the 200th blog post at the Volupe blog I have the honor to show you several very useful features regarding geometry handling in the new version of Simcenter STAR-CCM+, version 2402.
There are many features added in this release, especially when it comes to geometry handling. Therefor it will be both features presented in detail using videos, and also honorable mentions in terms of pictures. The features presented in this blog post are:
- Bulk sewing
- Toggle body visibility
- Partial bulk operations in 3D-CAD
- Interactive classification of part surfaces in Surface repair
- Extrude sketch up to plane
- Keep imprinted edges
- Sketches in unique colors
Bulk sewing and Toggling between visible and hidden bodies
In this first section we will of course use our favorite geometry, the rubber duck, to illustrate these two features.
In the video you will first see a feature that I personally have been wishing for to be implemented – Toggling the view between visible and hidden bodies – to inverse what is shown. This feature is very handy when you are preparing the fluid volume and selecting the surfaces/volumes of interest.
In the second part of the video, you find the feature of Bulk sewing. Bulk sewing has been introduced to provide better performance when working with many sheet bodies at the same time. Using the standard sewing operation, the user can in some cases experience a failed operation, but with the new bulk sewing feature the operation is much more robust. As seen in the video the bulk sewing can also be much faster. In the video, I first sew the rubber duck with the bulk sewing which take 1 second in my example and when using the standard bulk sewing the operation takes 17 seconds – meaning that the new feature is both more robust and faster.
Partial bulk operations in 3D-CAD
With Partial bulk operations you can now create operations that will work even though all input is not valid for the operation. Previously, if you had selected invalid input or settings for your operation you got an error message, but now you can execute the operation and even get a preview of which input will succeed and which will not. This is not only useful in terms of not getting errors, but also getting an overview of which input is valid and therefore noticing mistakes already before executing the operation.
Interactive classification of part surfaces in Surface repair
There have also been great features added in Surface repair, to ease the pre-processing work. The Interactive classification of part surfaces will help you when needing to group patches together and classify them as part surfaces. This feature covers an area that otherwise can be difficult to come around when using .stl format or wrapped surfaces, where the splitting of surface can be less straightforward. The classification feature as it’s own user interface and options for filling gaps in the surface you are working with together with settings to specify the scope of where surface repair should look for your geometry surfaces.
Extrude sketch up to plane
For the first honorable mention, the feature of extruding a sketch up to a plane has been added. In the picture below you see a preview of a sketch for an airfoil (to the left) that has been extruded to the red plane (to the right).
Keep imprinted edges
Another neat feature that has been added, which definitely is worth mentioning, is the possibility to keep imprinted edges in boolean operations, like the Unite operation. When uniting bodies you might want to keep the edges in order to being able to have different settings for the original patches. This was previously not as easy as in the new version, but now you have the option to enable “Keep imprinted edges”. See picture below to see the difference between version 2310 and 2402 when using the new option.
Sketches in unique colors
When you are creating your geometries in 3D-CAD in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ there is the risk of many sketches being stacked on top of each other giving a messy overview. As the last honorable mention, we will present that sketches that are not the active sketch will now have a different color. This making it much easier to visualize the current sketch.
We at Volupe are happy to share these features with you, hopefully you will have a lot of use for the features in your pre-processing.
In a previous blog post we discussed surface repair, please have a look at this blog post if you have not seen it yet https://volupe.com/blog-volupe/blog-post-surface-repair-useful-and-new-features/. And if you need more a training in 3D-CAD, you are welcome to register via this link https://volupe.com/events/3d-cad-training-onsite-in-simcenter-star-ccm-370/.
If there are any other questions you can contact us via support@volupe.com, happy pre-processing!
Author
Christoffer Johansson, M.Sc.
support@volupe.com
+46764479945
