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Using Onshape for CFD simulations
christopher_neal
Member Posts: 1 ✭
in General
Hi All,
I'm a CFD developer. One pet peeve of mine is the current state of mesh generation. Everyone has a different tool for making meshes, there are tons of different formats, and it is difficult to share your work with the community. In the end a mesh is just a series of points that have a connectivity. Surfaces are defined by unique markers.
Onshape has a nice database of models(similar to the amazing Sketchup Warehouse). I would love for the CFD community to be able to leverage something like that for use in their simulations. Everyone has drawn a box with a sphere in it for the purpose of learning to generate a mesh or doing their first CFD simulation. Why not be able to access a database of user-created geometry that is ready for meshing? Why reinvent the wheel? The state of CAD models on the web is astounding, but try to find a database of models that are ready for use in CFD? It doesn't exist in any clear form.
These models can easily serve as a starting point for a 3D mesh generator i.e. the models are the surface meshes that the mesh generators fill with cells. One thing that has always dogged my adoption of a CAD program for creating CFD geometry is the ability to quickly and cleanly mark surfaces of the geometry and have that information propagated to a standard output format. These boundary markers(unique integers for example) are very important for CFD calculations because they serve as the basis for the application of boundary conditions for the flows.
I saw that there are some models that are tagged with 'CFD' in the onshape database, but if they can only be saved in a format that doesn't preserve unique boundaries, then the models are useless.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: Is it possible for Onshape to support the ability to mark surfaces of a geometry such that when the geometry is written out to a file, the surface markers are transferred to the output file? Like colors being mapped to integers from 1-N, and then the faces that make up a colored surface being assigned the appropriate boundary marker based on the color?
Thank you,
Chris Neal
I'm a CFD developer. One pet peeve of mine is the current state of mesh generation. Everyone has a different tool for making meshes, there are tons of different formats, and it is difficult to share your work with the community. In the end a mesh is just a series of points that have a connectivity. Surfaces are defined by unique markers.
Onshape has a nice database of models(similar to the amazing Sketchup Warehouse). I would love for the CFD community to be able to leverage something like that for use in their simulations. Everyone has drawn a box with a sphere in it for the purpose of learning to generate a mesh or doing their first CFD simulation. Why not be able to access a database of user-created geometry that is ready for meshing? Why reinvent the wheel? The state of CAD models on the web is astounding, but try to find a database of models that are ready for use in CFD? It doesn't exist in any clear form.
These models can easily serve as a starting point for a 3D mesh generator i.e. the models are the surface meshes that the mesh generators fill with cells. One thing that has always dogged my adoption of a CAD program for creating CFD geometry is the ability to quickly and cleanly mark surfaces of the geometry and have that information propagated to a standard output format. These boundary markers(unique integers for example) are very important for CFD calculations because they serve as the basis for the application of boundary conditions for the flows.
I saw that there are some models that are tagged with 'CFD' in the onshape database, but if they can only be saved in a format that doesn't preserve unique boundaries, then the models are useless.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: Is it possible for Onshape to support the ability to mark surfaces of a geometry such that when the geometry is written out to a file, the surface markers are transferred to the output file? Like colors being mapped to integers from 1-N, and then the faces that make up a colored surface being assigned the appropriate boundary marker based on the color?
Thank you,
Chris Neal
0
Comments
I have done a lot of CFD and completely understand your request here but wanted to see what your thoughts would be for an angle like this... it might be worth seeing about building an app to have this interaction. Any other input would be very helpful to gather the scope of what we can do to help.