Hello everyone,
first of all, congratulations for the platform, it is robust and very friendly.
I am trying to perform an external CFD flow simulation for the FORMULA SAE competition. I have the CAD files from SolidWorks and I am facing a lot of problems in the mesh generation. I always tried to use the Automatic Snappy Hex mesh generator and did not succeed. I will explain the issues I had for each format file.
My geometry has some different parts, like the careen, pilot, motor, wheels, etc… but everything in the same assembly and, consequently, in the same STEP / IGES file.
STEP format: It recognizes all the geometry and when I run the mesh, it seems the mesh generator only recognizes the careen, because it only meshes the careen. The other parts do not appear meshed. I tried a lot of approachs, tried to save every single part into step format, re-open it as solidworks part, make an assembly again and export it to STEP, but always the mesh generator does not recognize the other parts. I checked and all my parts in SolidWorks are solid, and the ones which were not I made changes in order to make it solid.
IGES format: it recognizes the geometry well, with no gaps and no weird surfaces at all. However, when I generate the mesh (it recognizes all the parts now) there are some gaps in the careen surface and, consequently, it generates fluid inside the careen, which is wrong. It was supposed to have fluid around the car, not inside it. I cheked my CAD file a lot of times and I could not find anything wrong with it. Also, the geometry platform form SimScale seems to recognize all the features very well. I thought it could be due to a very coarse mesh which would not be capturing the surface features, but I did a fine mesh and the problem kept happening.
Well, I tried so many different approaches in SolidWorks and also using diferent mesh genereators in SimScale, but I did not succeed. I hope some one can help me. I am looking forward to share this project with you all.
I hope anyone can help me.
Best regards,
Lisandro Maders