Meshing Packed Bed of Particles

[mjafari2]

Hi,

I am working with a packed bed of particles containing 3110 solid bodies and 1 fluid region (created by subtracting the solid bodies from a bounding box). I generated this geometry in SpaceClaim and applied Shared Topology. Note that I shrank the particles to ensure there is no contact between them, and I also merged slivers with the fluid region.

The shape of my packed bed is slender, with a length and width of 0.8 mm and a height of 70 mm. When I import it into Fluent Meshing, it cannot mesh the geometry and shows unexpected behavior. For example, it does not display my boundary conditions properly, although I named them correctly in SpaceClaim. I only see my peripheral boundaries, whereas I cannot see the inlet and outlet in the boundary lists. Furthermore, when surface meshing is complete, the software does not display the surface mesh.

I should note that I successfully meshed previous cases where the geometry was not slender and the height-to-width ratio was significantly lower. I am using Enterprise Fluent, so there should not be any license limitations.

Could you please advise on what might be causing this problem and how I can solve it? Thank you for your time.

 

 

 

[Rob]

If you're only modelling the fluid part why did you use share topology? 

[mjafari2]

Because I want to mesh and solve the solid region!