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Meshing Application
The Meshing Application in the ANSYS Workbench environment provides a central location for a variety of meshing methods available from the ANSYS meshing software portfolio. On a per-part basis, the Meshing Application can assign different meshing methods, for example, a swept or extruded mesh (prism or hexahedral elements) in a long pipe. The meshing methods available include swept meshing, advancing front with inflation meshing (AFI), patch-independent meshing, hex-dominant meshing, plus a number of others. The meshing application provides a number of centralized services such as virtual topology, which can be applied for all meshing methods.
Advancing Front with Inflation Meshing
The CFX-Mesh AFI software is an easy-to-learn, easy-to-use CFD mesh generation tool which produces high quality hybrid meshes for both simple and complex geometries.It is an integrated component within the Meshing Aapplication of ANSYS Workbench.
A highly-automated meshing tool within the ANSYS Workbench environment, AFI meshing is closely coupled to ANSYS DesignModeler for geometry creation and meshing. Geometry can also be obtained directly from a variety of CAD packages.
Automatic 2-D, 3-D and extruded meshing: The AFI mesher can produce translational and axisymmetric 2-D meshes (meshes that are one element thick), allowing rapid prototyping for suitable geometries. A similar method can also be used to create extruded meshes. For 3-D meshing, the mesher provides automatic surface and volume meshing. In regions of high surface curvature, the mesh is automatically refined in order to maintain the necessary geometric resolution. This control, which can be applied globally and overridden locally, greatly reduces the need for manual specification of mesh spacing.
3-D Proximity: 3-D proximity detection automatically refines the mesh in areas where geometric features are in close proximity and result in small spaces within the volume. This improves robustness and reduces user input.
Virtual Edge/Surface Capability: Many CAD geometries contain surfaces and edges that introduce geometrical features that the mesh unnecessarily resolves. The AFI mesher avoids this resolution by allowing surfaces and edges to be merged together with neighboring entities. This process can be invoked automatically using a range of preset merging strategies or manually. This capability is extremely useful for geometries that contain sliver surfaces produced by CAD packages as a result of merging surfaces or bodies.
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Automatically generated surface mesh for cylinders in close proximity (left) and corresponding inflated volume mesh (below).
Prismatic inflation: Flow adjacent to walls is characterized by high velocity and turbulence gradients in the normal direction. While tetrahedral cells can be used in such boundary layers, greater accuracy can be achieved using prism elements. ANSYS AFI meshing software automatically creates prisms by extruding the triangular surface mesh, thereby ensuring the highest quality of solutions. This meshing tool provides a number of different prismatic inflation schemes. The prismatic mesh can be inflated by a prescribed number of layers or alternatively, the prismatic mesh can expand the mesh size to match seamlessly with the tetrahedral mesh, avoiding discontinuity in cell size between different cell types. In addition, a new alternative allows prismatic inflation to produce extended inflation layers (at unit aspect ratio) into the domain, filling it more efficiently and ensuring maximum prismatic mesh throughout the domain.
