Hi everybody,
we are organizing a training session during the next preCICE workshop where we’d like to offer an engineering-focused module concerning fluid-structure interaction, where one would set up a non-trivial simulation from scratch, using day-to-day tools (I’m citing @Makis here… ).
We are currently setting things up: the ecosystem is composed of CalculiX-preCICE.OpenFOAM. This is not yet written in stone, but we believe that the list above allows us to show the most interesting features.
My current question, to all who are potentially interested and to whom might have experience, concerns solid meshing with CalculiX. I haven’t found yet a straightforward way to go from a shape drawn with whichever tool and exported in some portable format (STEP, STL, IGES…) to CalculiX.
I have some notion of some possible procedures:
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some of them convert an externally generated mesh, exported in UNV format and converted in Abaqus/CalculiX file format with some other tools such as:
- unv2ccx: it converts a Salome unv mesh to a *.inp file suitable for CalculiX. One has to pay attention to some details here when exporting the mesh. It worked for me but it can be tricky. There are precompiled binaries for linux and windows here.
- unical3: it is similar to the above, as shown in the this tutorial, but it looks like one has to compile it by himself
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PrePoMax: it should do anything needed for preprocessing. Nevertheless, it runs only on Windows (afaik) and we only need to generate a mesh with some node groups for boundary conditions
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FreeCAD: in particular the FEM module, which allows to generate a mesh and export it in CalculiX format.
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gmsh: it appears that we need a converter here too. I don’t have much experience here.
Many of the tools above are pretty complete. I have a quite strong preference for Salome in generating meshes, as it looks to me that it is more versatile and allows me to have more control on mesh features, but probably it is due to larger use and experience. In this case I would choose case 1 above.
So, summarizing this loooong post: do you have notion of other tools? Which one would you prefer? Our goal is not to spend too much time in solid meshing, as the goal of the training concerns FSI. Nevertheless, we’d like to address each phase of the workflow with reasonable detail.
Please comment on this post or send me a direct message if you have other questions regarding the training session.
Kind regards
Claudio