Analysis has stopped because the Solver has exited unexpectedly - during meshing

[rjohanss]

I am doing some CFD work and have been able to generate meshes and run analyses for a while, but recently I have been getting an error during meshing stating that the Analysis has stopped because the Solver has exited unexpectedly. I looked around the discussions here but can't seem to figure out what is wrong. The error shows up during different stages of meshing, sometimes during the surface smoothing, sometimes during volume creation, sometimes during volume optimization.

- I don't think it is a problem with the computer hardware, as the computer I'm using it on has 48GB RAM and it is never all in use when the error occurs

- The files are located on a harddrive within the computer, so I don't think it's a result of a networked drive

- I meshed a model yesterday with no problems. I tried the same model again today with the same settings and I got the error. I even tried to coarsen the refinement regions but that still didn't help.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on and how I can fix it?

Thanks,

Reed

[LKania]

We rarely, if ever, see the mesher fail as you have described. To verify that this is actually a meshing issue, can you locate the master mesher log file here: C:\Users\name\AppData\Local\Autodesk\Simulation CFD 2015\mesher.log, zip this and then upload?

[rjohanss]

I can certainly upload that file. I was able to get some simple geometry designs to work today and decided to give the previous design another try with the same settings as before that had worked and then not worked. This time it worked fine. I then modified the scenario, decreasing the element sizes in my refinement regions and tried to mesh the design and again it threw up the error. I'm attaching the mesher.log file as well as the share file for the design that is giving me problems.

Thank you,

Reed

[rjohanss]

And here is the CFZ file.

[LKania · Accepted solution]

Seems there are two issues in play that tag team to cause the failure you are seeing sometimes during surface meshing and at other times during volume meshing. You'll need to (1) use the surface refinement option in the meshing task; simply enable the so named checkbox and hit the 'Refine' button, and (2) disable the multithreaded volume meshing option. I used the sharefile (.cfz) you had posted originally, and the final mesh was upwards of 7.3M elements. 

[rjohanss]

Yeah the reason I had enabled multi-threaded meshing was because the mesh had so many elements and I was trying to cut down on the time it was taking to get done. If I enable surface refinement and leave the multi-threaded volume meshing on, will I still encounter this problem?

Thanks,

Reed

[LKania]

Reed,

  Your reasoning makes a lot of sense, but issues with autosizing and the threaded meshing option are both contributing to the failure. You'll have to also disable threaded volume meshing and wait it out I'm afraid.

[rjohanss]

Ouch. Well thanks for your help!

Reed