ANSYS ICEM CFD AutoHexa is a program used for modeling and automatically meshing configurations of objects that have certain pre-defined shapes. These shapes include rectangular blocks, cylinders and truncated cones, inclined walls with thickness, polygonal prisms, rectangles and circles. All of these objects must be aligned with the coordinate axes in at least one of their directions and can intersect each other in certain ways.
The user first creates the objects in the model and assigns families to the interiors and faces of the objects. A family is basically a name that describes what boundary conditions should be applied to the faces and interiors that have the family. Every face or interior with the same family must have exactly the same boundary conditions. The mesh is generated
automatically, but the user can specify optional size constraints in a variety of ways. The mesh consists of hexahedra with some prism elements where necessary. It is technically unstructured, but it has a semi-structured, or more precisely, hierarchical multi-block, organization. Once the mesh is generated, the user can assign boundary conditions to families, and write the input for the solver. The example outlined below is a model for the study of flow around a room.
The subway station depicted below illustrates how AutoHexa can be used to model buildings for an atmospheric flow field calculation. The subway station model and mesh illustrates a possible application of ICEM CFD AutoHexa. We would like to encourage our customers to explore the ‘ease of use’ of AutoHexa in other areas as well.
Features
- A simple object-based modeling system utilizing, primarily Cartesian geometry: rectangular prisms, cylinders and truncated cones, inclined planes, and polygonal prisms.
- Interactive positioning and modification of objects and families.
- Automatic hexahedral meshing using a "hierarchical multi-block" approach.
- Rapid mesh generation: ~5K elements/second.
- Utilization of O-grids allow for detailed control of boundary layers.
- Utilization of prisms and other element types when necessary.
- Parametric specification of mesh size in and near individual objects and in the overall model.
- Pre-processor for ICEM CFD Tetra, Hexa, and Global.
- Automatic computation of material points, prescribed points, and curves.
- Boundary condition editing similar to Hexa and Unput.
- Family defininition for interiors of objects and for all object faces.
- A customizable system for specific industry segments.
For electromagnetic field simulation, it is distributed by CRC Ltd Japan under the name Magna TDM Modeler, together with ICEM CFD Visual3 (available in Asia only).