HowTo Import a fluent mesh with interfaces

1 Purpose

The purpose of this short HowTo is to explain the few steps that are necessary in order to read a fluent mesh that contains interfaces.

2 How is it done

A mesh with an interface is a mesh containing two overlapping surfaces that do not necessary share the same discretization nodes, as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Non-conformal mesh

To convert such a mesh, just use fluentMeshToFoam utility. Let consider the current case, where an "inlet", an "outlet" and two interface "interface_coarse" and "interface_fine" boundaries are defined. The rest of the boundaries are defined as walls. Once imported, the mesh consists of actually two separated volumes, by the interface_fine and interface_coarse surfaces. The second step is to stitch the meshes by spliting the faces of the two interfaces creating polyhedral cells: stitchMesh ./ test_interfaces interface_fine interface_coarse test_interface/geometry/test_interface.msh

Now the mesh looks like in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Stiched mesh

The utility will preserve also the original patches as boundaries, but since they are no longer needed, they can be safely deleted from the polyMesh/boundary file.

3 Download

The sources of the test case can be downloaded from: [test_interfaces]