Learning Forum

[T-Ying Lin]

The geometry is shown here with a rectangular prism representing fluid completely encasing a solid cylinder. I am trying to set up inflation for the mesh for both the cylinder and the surrounding fluid but whenever I select the cylindrical faces of the cavity within the fluid for the solid cylinder the following mesh forms. It seems to invert the direction of the mesh. Is this a setting that I need to adjust or is my geometry unsuited for inflation meshing? 

 

[Rob]

I assume you have a volume for the outer section too? When you add the inflation which volume is it attached to?

[T-Ying Lin]

When I add the inflation, it is attached to the outer volume and produecs the displayed mesh. I know this for certain.

[Rob]

Assuming you're in Workbench Meshing you should see two volumes in the geometry part. Hide the cylinder then set up the inflation. Then see what happens. 

[T-Ying Lin]

Upon hiding the cylinder, I set up a section plane so I can see the internal cylindrical walls and set up the inflation, the same problem with the mesh appears. 

[Rob]

Weird. Can you leave the cylinder hidden and just mesh the outer region (right click mesh selected object)?

[T-Ying Lin]

When I mesh the outer region without the inflation, the mesh forms normally. While I could mesh this a consistently finer mesh throughout the entirety of the volume, I was hoping to reduce the number of nodes that I would need (for obvious reasons).

[Rob]

That's a function of the max cell size. Sizing is covered in the tutorials. 

[T-Ying Lin]

Perhaps, but does this change the issue with inflation? I still wanted to set up an inflation mesh control for the layers near the cylinder because I wanted to model natural convection. 

[Rob]

That may depend on the inflation settings. If you're looking at natural convection you also need to look at boundary separation and bulk flow phenomena.