Autodesk Simulation CFD

[#1]

As of now, an hour after I hit 'Solve', the design study is still hanging on "Volume meshing...creating volume mesh."  Based on previous studies I have run, I would expect it to have given me an error already if there was one.  I will leave it overnight and see if I get any error message, but why do you think this is happening?  Is there anything I can do to either get it to mesh properly or get an error message more quickly?

[#2]

If the volume meshing takes much longer than you would expect based on similar applications it is most likely that the meshing is going to fail. In other words, for most cases: the volume meshing is fast (relative to the element count) or it won't work.

If you do not receive an error message within the expected time, there are probably small gaps that are with the applied sizing to be filled with relatively big elements. This ends up in highly skewed elements and a successful generation of the mesh enhancement (boundary layer elements) is impossible. (this is also the most common issue if you receive an error message)

To find these problem regions you may disable the mesh enhancement temporarily and use after the mesh generation a cut plane with the "shaded mesh" option. The solution for a successful meshing is finally to remove these gaps if they aren't necessary for the flow or to refine them. Gap refinement may be very helpful, if the gaps are important for the simulation.

To immediately and manually stop the mesher you can end the process mesher.exe in Task Manager.

[#3 · Accepted solution]

In addition to what Marco has pointed out, you may want to step through this Solution as it outlines many of the diagnostics we would use ourselves for troubleshooting Mesh issues

Mesh Error in SimCFD

Apolo

[#4]

I would start with the last option in the solution.

6. Disable mesh boundary layer blending

This control adjusts the way Mesh Enhancement layers transition throughout the model, and is a "flag" control. To invoke this setting, add this item to your cfdesign_flags.txt file, located in the Autodesk® Simulation CFD installation folder.

mesh_boundarylayer_blend 0

Tests have shown that this setting can allow for successful mesh generation.