Learning Forum

[peteroznewman]

I have a pipe solid body with a second solid body that is a circular valve flap with two cylindrical posts for the rotation axis that protrude into the pipe thickness. There is no matching hole in the pipe, the solids just interfere. This was done deliberately to find out if interfering solids can be accommodated in Watertight Fluent Meshing. What I find is an error message shown in the image below, so the answer is no, Watertight Fluent Meshing cannot tolerate interfering solids.

Now I am trying to follow the Fault Tolerant Meshing workflow which should be able to tolerate interfering solids.  I saved the geometry in the .fmd format and have watched the Fault Tolerant meshing video tutorial in the ANSYS help system for 2019 R2.

This video skips some of the details. I managed to get to the point of Update Region Settings when I get this error.

I don't know how to get past this point.

[peteroznewman]

I am reading the Watertight Fluent Meshing training materials on the ANSYS Learning Hub, and just learned to not name capping surfaces with inlet or outlet because it creates fluid regions where there should be solid regions. I had made that mistake in my model which might be causing me some problems in the Fault Tolerant meshing that I tried above. Now that I have corrected that, I got through the workflow.

Next I will look to see what it did with the fluid mesh around the interfering solids. I can see some red fluid between the valve and pipe. In the interfering solid region, it looks like it made a void.

Any comments?

[Rob]

Labelling surfaces with interior, internal, inlet etc auto-assign surface types in Fluent. So always a good idea to use surface names very wisely.  The fault tolerant tools are fairly new and expert more functions with the next few releases (including more tutorials!). 

Other comments; you need to get out more?  

[peteroznewman]

Ha! "get out more", said the man at the top of this week's Leaderboard.

[Rob]