Getting Started Guide : CFD meshing with ANSYS ICEM CFD

Welcome to the course on “CFD meshing with ANSYS ICEM CFD”. As you have just begun this course, here is a short document which will guide you on how to proceed with this course. This course could be typically finished in 3 weeks.Below is a week by week planner which will help you to get the best out of this course!!

If you have any queries during any of the lecture, feel free to contact me on mytutor@learncax.com. You can also schedule a live WebEx/Skype sessions with me to resolve your queries.

This is the overall plan designed based on my experience with previous students. The timelines are rough estimation about how much time is necessary for this course. This does not mean that you should complete your course in given timeline only. The idea is to get correct knowledge of the subject. So do not hesitate to modify this plan and extend the timeline if necessary. It is also assumed that you are not going to have any long break in-between the course. I also suggest you not to do this as you may need to repeat few lessons in that case.

Week 1

Following are the tasks you can try to achieve in the first week. The main objective is to get familiar with our Learning Management System (LMS) and to get and overview of what CFD is? The objective this week is to complete CFD foundation module. After completing this module you would have good understanding of CFD and three important steps in CFD viz. pre-processing, solution and post-processing.
At the end of week, you can also plan to get introduced to ANSYS ICEM CFD software. The target is to understand the user interface and geometry creation in ANSYS ICEM CFD.

  • Get yourself familiar with LearnCAx LMS 
  • Read the course guide 
  • Watch & Understand the ‘Introduction to CFD’ lecture videos 
  • Solve the Unit Test -1 & 2
  • Watch & Understand the ‘CFD equations and numerical solutions’ lecture videos   
  • Watch & Understand the ‘Finite Volume Method’ lecture videos
  • Watch & Understand ‘CFD Analysis – The software perspective’ lecture videos
  • Watch & Understand ‘Introduction to GUI of ICEM CFD’ lecture videos
  • Watch & Understand ‘Geometry creation in ICEM CFD’ lecture videos
  • Watch & Understand ‘demos on geometry creation in ICEM’ videos tutorials
  • Watch & Understand ‘ICEM geometry clean up’ video tutorial

Week 2

The objective of this week is to develop understanding and expertise in multiblock hexahedral meshing in ANSYS ICEM CFD. This method is one of the critical methods to learn and needs lot of practice to get comfortable with. Make sure that after understanding the concepts, you practice those on simple geometries. Do not try this on complicated geometries at first. This is one of the difficult methods to understand, so try to allocate more time as compared to what you have allocated in first two weeks.

This week you can also keep the target of knowing more about pre-processing software ANSYS ICEM CFD. As compared to first week, these are bit heavy target to keep, but I believe that you have already accelerated your learning process.

  • Watch & Understand ‘Hexahedral meshing in ICEM CFD’ lecture videos
  • Solve objective type test on ICEM Hexa Blocking
  • Watch & Understand ‘Demo on Hexa meshing of a sample cylinder in ICEM’
  • Watch & Understand ‘ICEM hexa meshing’ video tutorial
  • Practice the standard ANSYS tutorial on meshing a 2D pipe junction using ICEM (This is standard tutorial available with ANSYS ICEM CFD; you can download it from ANSYS Customer portal.)
  • Practice the standard ANSYS tutorial on meshing a 3D pipe junction using ICEM (This is standard tutorial available with ANSYS Fluent; you can download it from ANSYS Customer portal.)
  • Practice the standard ANSYS tutorial on Hexa mesh generation for an elbow part (This is standard tutorial available with ANSYS Fluent; you can download it from ANSYS Customer portal.)

Week 3

The main objective of week 3 is to get around unstructured meshing technique in ANSYS ICEM CFD. For complex geometries, this is the most regularly used meshing method. As mutliblock method takes lot of practice, this method would come really handy if you want to get the feel of complete CFD process. You can easily create a mesh for simple geometry and try your knowledge on solver quickly.

Most of the required basic learning of hexa meshing is finished by end of Week 3. The knowledge you have till know would be sufficient to work on the assignment.
I will share problem definition and geometry file of the assignment at the start of this week. You can start working on it.

At the start of this week I will also share tutorial files of Tetra meshing, you can start working on it as you progress.

  • Watch & Understand ‘Hexameshing’ lecture videos 
  • Watch & Understand ICEM shell meshing lecture videos
  • Watch & Understand ICEM Tetra volume meshing lecture videos
  • Watch & Understand ICEM Tetra prism lecture videos
  • Watch & Understand demo video on tetra meshing of a sample cylinder in ICEM
  • Watch & Understand the tetra meshing video tutorial
  • Practice the standard ANSYS tutorial on Tetra meshing of a helicopter geometry (This is standard tutorial available with ANSYS ICEM CFD; you can download it from ANSYS Customer portal.)
  • Complete the course assignment on ‘Mesh generation of 2D profile geometry’
  • Complete the course assignment on ‘Meshing generation for Heat exchanger geometry’
  • Complete the course assignment on ‘Mesh generation for Catalytic convertor geometry’

Course Closure

By the end of six weeks, you should submit the assignments for evaluation. I will review the files and if needed you may need to work for some more time to do the required modification.

After completion of the review process, your course coordinator will send you the course certificate and hard copy of lecture notes. You can use these lecture notes for any further studies.