Learning Forum

[Gregory Harrington]

First time Ansys Fluent user here. I have about 9 years experience using STARCCM+ previously.

I have a volume mesh containing ~14M cells and the file size is 3.8GB which seems a bit big for just a mesh file and it takes almost an hour to save on my laptop when using 16 cores. I can only imagine how big it will be and how long it will take to solve the simulation file when it actually has data associated with it. The mesh is saved as a .h5 file.

Is this typically how big mesh files of this many cells are or am I doing something wrong?

[Rob]

Parallel meshing isn't as efficient as the solve, so you may be seeing some effect there. It's a bigger file than normal, but as I don't know how many boundaries there are it's difficult to comment: it's not excessively large though. Are you saving locally or to a remote drive? How much RAM have you got?

[Gregory Harrington]

I am saving to a drive that's mapped on my company's network. My laptop has 32 GB RAM and 2.10 Ghz I7. There's maybe 30 different boundaries but I figured the mesh file size would be dependent on the total cells and not the number of boundaries. I was nervous about how big the file is and I don't even have boundary layer meshing enabled.

The surface mesh took about 4 hrs to mesh and the volume mesh only took 15 minutes which shocked me at how quick the volume mesh was.

 

[Rob]

It's a combination of multiple factors - cell count and boundary faces being two of them. As I don't know what you're meshing it's hard to judge. 

By company I assume a commercial licence? We're only able to offer general advice on here, direct support (from Ansys or Channel) can give more details and review files. 

If you can, save locally and then copy over to the remote drive. You should find that's both faster and safer as you can't drop data packets on a local machine. It's a problem that comes and goes as solver, network and hardware speeds vary.