Learning Forum

[sam_5195]

I am doing a flow analysis of solar panels and their supporting structure. It involves parts of supporting structure which are as small as 8e-04 thickness and the whole enclosure is of about 70m x70mx 10m. The problem is when i try to mesh them using edge sizing for very large edges(~10m) and very small ones with appropriate element sizes it consistently throws up three errors: 

message 1:
Ansys mesh the surface mesh is intersecting or close to intersecting making it difficult to create a volume mesh please adjust the mesh size or adjust the geometry to fix the problem.
message 2:
A mesh could not be generated using the current meshing options and settings

message 3:

The mesh generation did not complete due to poor quality elements or incorrect input.

I tried pinching, virtual topology as well as keeping the element size and max face size very low(which sometimes freezes the computer) to no avail. I am wondering whether i could remove the small edges but the thing is i intend to perform stress analysis using the flow data which probably could affect the results  Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Rob]

You're losing the small edges in the tolerance. In Fluent we use a thin wall which has no thickness or you can also remove small features. If you do need those features you need to reduce the cell sizes to fully capture them: in a domain that size you're going to get a VERY big mesh. 

[sam_5195]

Thank you very much. Just to clarify do you mean there is no way around it except maybe removing all the small thicknesses in spaceclaim?

[Rob]

No, you can also resolve the mesh at that level: ie your cells will need to be 0.2mm.  You don't have enough compute for that so I'd advise removing/simplifying the geometry. 

[sam_5195]

Thanks a lot for your answers.