Meshing in OpenFOAM

Objectives

The objectives for this tutorial are as follows:

• Familiarize yourself with the OpenFOAM case structure,
• Import a two-dimensional mesh into OpenFOAM and check its quality,
• Create a unstructured hexahedral-dominated mesh with cartesianMesh,
• Check the mesh quality with checkMesh,
• Visualize the mesh and its quality criterion in ParaView.

Overview

This tutorial will describe how to either import an existing mesh into OpenFOAM or create a mesh within OpenFOAM itself. The first mesh is a two-dimensional elbow named elbow.msh created with ANSYS ICEM CFD. The second mesh is a hexahedral-dominated mesh of a group of buildings created with cartesianMesh. Once the meshes have been either imported or created, their quality will be checked using checkMesh. Finally, the meshes will be visualized with ParaView.

Preparation

Before starting, perform the following steps for preparation:

1. Download the archive 2_mesh_generation.zip from the Downloads folder on the OPAL course page.
2. Extract the archive.
3. Open a terminal, navigate to the newly created folder, and source OpenFOAM.

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Table of contents

• Mesh Import
• Hex-dominant Mesh Generation
• Exercise