ICEM CFD interactive/batch controls can be found in the advanced options of several different methods in ANSYS Meshing.

ANSYS Meshing is the general purpose meshing tool found in the ANSYS Workbench environment. It includes a lot of powerful ICEM and TGrid meshing technology, but exposed in a simplified and automated way. For instance, MultiZone in ANSYS Meshing is based on ICEM CFD hexa technology, but without the learning curve associated with blocking, edge distributions, etc.

However, there are some occasions when advanced users want to take more direct and interactive control over their meshing. ANSYS Meshing allows advanced users to “pop the hood” on some mesh methods with the “ICEM CFD Interactive” options (TGrid interactive is also available as a Beta option). ICEM CFD interactive allows users to launch ICEM CFD with all its controls. You can do full hexa blocking, tetra/prism, shell meshing, diagnostics, automatic or interactive mesh editing, etc. You can start from just the geometry, transferred to ICEM CFD with meshing parameters, or you can actually start with the mesh and adjust it from there. For instance, you could generate an PI tetra mesh in ANSYS Meshing using “Interactive” with “Post Operation” and then use the extended ICEM CFD tools to replace the mesh with a smooth delaunay fill or 12 Tetra to 1 Hexa conversion, smooth, and then return to ANSYS Meshing.

Here ICEM CFD interactive is used with the Uniform Quad Method to bring an interactive hexa 2D blocking into ANSYS Meshing.

ANSYS Meshing is parametric and persistent, meaning that if your mesh generation is part of a parametric design study, and geometry parameters are changed, the mesh is regenerated automatically, with all the settings, for each new design. Instead of a parametric history tree, ICEM CFD can be scripted with a replay file. When using ICEM CFD interactive, it is very straightforward to record the operations. You can then switch from ICEM CFD interactive to ICEM CFD Batch and use the more advanced setup as part of your parametric update.

Would you like to see how some of this is done? Here is a video demo that covers the important bits…

I look forward to seeing some the creative ways that our users will be able to leverage this functionality.