Import mesh from auto meshing program

[UNSWHilbert]

Hi all,

I am interested in running virtual windtunnel cases. What I mean with that is that I want to import an stl, define a box around it and put flow through the box. Because I would like this to be a semi-automated process I have been working with auto meshing tools like fluent-meshing and snappyHexMesh(OpenFOAM mesher).

From what I have seen from Eilmer the only programs that natively export a mesh for use in Eilmer are Gmsh, Pointwise and Gridpro.
From what i have read the only one of those that has decent auto unstructured meshing capability is the latest version of Pointwise and I am not sure how mature that capability is.

Because of the above I have two questions I hope to get some input on:
1: Does anyone have any experience with the latest version of Pointwise, building a script that imports an stl defines a box around the stl and meshes that?
2: The most promising route I can see currently is converting an OpenFOAM mesh to the appropriate format. There is the following thread https://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/su2/127445-tool-convert-openfoam-mesh-su2-mesh-2d-3d.html but I have never been able to get the python script in there to work. Does anybody have any experience in converting an OpenFOAM mesh to a format that Eilmer will take?

[uqngibbo]

Hi Hilbert,

Pointwise should be able to convert OpenFoam files to SU2 for you, but I don't know how easy this will be to automate. There is a scripting interface you can try, but I don't know if it can be called from command line. You might be stuck trying to use someone's dodgy python script, since there doesn't seem to be an official foam -> SU2 program.

I think we have a user who has done completely automated mesh generation in Gmsh before. Is that something you might be interested in?

[UNSWHilbert]

Hi Nick,

I will have a look at using Pointwise for the conversion, I have never tried that, thanks for the suggestion.
I love Gmsh for 2D and 2D rotational/extruded problems. The issue is that I have never been able to generate a nice mesh from an stl with appropriate boundary layer elements. If you know of any Gmsh scripts that generate a good quality 3D mesh over any stl (say waverider) with nice boundary layer elements I would definitely be interested.