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IDProjectCategoryView StatusLast Update
0001376OpenFOAMBugpublic2016-02-02 18:28
Reporterseaspray Assigned Tohenry  
PriorityhighSeveritymajorReproducibilityalways
Status closedResolutionsuspended 
PlatformUnixOSOtherOS Version(please specify)
Summary0001376: Abysmal performance of snappyHexMesh is #1 obstacle to any serious CFD work with OpenFOAM today!!
DescriptionSHM layers algorithm is useless in virtually all real-world viscous flow cases. The abysmal performance of SHM in general is the key reason why OpenFOAM cannot be used for any serious CFD work, research or commercial today. Sorry. The solvers are excellent, but the meshes need to be created elsewhere within a commercial package.

Parties offering CFD services based on OpenFOAM have developed unreleased meshers they license out at high cost, i.e. engys and their working version of snappyHexMesh aka helix-Mesh.
Steps To ReproduceReplace ship geometry in openfoam230/tutorials/multiphase/interDyMFoam/ras/DTCHull with yacht hull supplied here, increase viscous layers to 10 and try meshing - or any variant based on this.
I literally spent weeks trying to create a workflow that would mesh this simple geometry properly with 10 quality viscous layers within 30mm from the body, and failed.

It is possible to get reasonable snapping, but layers collapse and regrow along the symmetry plane, or disappear completely, it is totally unreliable, there are way too many obscure parameters (nGrow!=0 for example only ever destroyed all my layers) and no usable mesh can be produced.
Additional InformationI eventually implemented a workaround by growing one single layer of cells, feature refinement disabled to obtain a consistent thickness (viscous layers should not thin down and increase again following the surrounding mesh size, and NO, absolute layer thickness is NOT reliable) and then repeatedly called refineWallLayer to subdivide this layer. Problem is that the first layer from SHM is not great and then refineWallLayer doesn't care about cell quality.
The solution was attractive, but SHM was still not robust enough and the whole setup collapsed as soon as I altered the background mesh or geometry.

Trying to grow consecutive layers in SHM is hopeless. Defects and problems compound rapidly and the process fails miserably. I suggest redesigning it as follow:
1/ offset the surface by the thickness of all layers
2/ snap to this surface
3/ extrude the surface mesh through to the geometry patch
4/ refine the cells in layers

This is how some of the best and most successful automatic meshers on the market operate and they produce perfectly even and consistent boundary layers.

We have had discussions about this with more context on:
http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/openfoam-meshing-snappyhexmesh/85322-controlling-y-values-snappyhexmesh.html
TagsMesh, snappyHexMesh

Activities

seaspray

2014-08-19 05:35

reporter  

SHIP.stl (1,856,307 bytes)

user4

2014-08-20 16:33

 

layers.png (20,887 bytes)   
layers.png (20,887 bytes)   

user4

2014-08-20 17:02

  ~0003212

Thanks for the feedback. The shrinking procedure can have problems with large layer thickness v.s. cell size but the big advantage is that it is fully undoable so will likely produce something that obeys the mesh quality constraints.

What is your snappyHexMesh setup and blockMesh? I just did a quick snappyHexMesh run with a coarse mesh and get 10 layers (but no features) and pretty complete coverage (99.6%). (see layers around trailing edge in pic)

seaspray

2014-08-20 21:41

reporter  

SHM-Hull.tar.gz (230,921 bytes)

seaspray

2014-08-20 22:20

reporter  

DTC-Mesh-10-layers.png (188,826 bytes)   
DTC-Mesh-10-layers.png (188,826 bytes)   

seaspray

2014-08-20 22:33

reporter   ~0003213

Ok, I have attached the setup with the scripts building the mesh. I ended up taking as much of the processing away from SHM because it was so misbehaved. I build and refine the blockMesh, select cells sets and perform isotropic refinement around the geometry, extract features and snap with one call to SHM, then call SHM again to produce one layer. The only reason for the two SHM dictionaries was to allow me to get the snapping and features right and inspect this before going further.

Put the proximity refinement back into SHM, combine the snapping and layers dictionaries and grow 10 layers from there, removing the use of refineWallLayer etc.

Growing 10 layers around a damaged geometry in a uniform coarse mesh is not a real world case, it is play-meshing. No one is going to care whether it works or not. I took the DTC tutorial case again, increased the number of layers to 10, changed nothing else and meshed. A snapshot of the result is attached. It is a useless mess.
No matter what the process used to generate them is, viscous layers must have an even thickness, they must be continuous and they need to be reliable. This is not less important than mesh quality constraints, because running the solver is not the end game. The end game is good simulation results with good resolution of the boundary layers, good numerical results and no artifacts. It takes a clean, smooth and tidy mesh to do this and OpenFOAM is unable to produce one at present.
Meshers that successfully create such meshes don't grow consecutive layers from the surface as far as I have been able to see. I tried reversing the process using the scripts attached and it was a lot more successful, but still way too unreliable because of SHM.

chris

2015-12-15 11:51

manager   ~0005763

seaspray,

I understand your frustration, particularly your comment "Parties offering CFD services based on OpenFOAM have developed unreleased meshers they license out at high cost, i.e. engys and their working version of snappyHexMesh aka helix-Mesh."

This is a good example why we started the campaign to see modified versions of OpenFOAM made publicly available:
http://cfd.direct/open-source/where-is-the-source-code/

Anyone who has modified code is entitled to release it publicly under the GPL. Anyone is free to campaign on the public's behalf.

Chris Greenshields
OpenFOAM Foundation and CFD Direct

GeckoVM

2016-01-04 11:36

reporter   ~0005798

I tried to use SHM in an industrial environment with mixed success. There is, however, one thing I noticed; thin layer addition is mostly affected by those cells where the wall faces are warped. One can force creation of layers by disabling most quality checks during that phase and indeed get complete coverage, but then the solver will crash.

My hypothesis is that, once you have significant face twist on a wall, if you then extrude a very thin layer cell, all sorts of problems can occur with that cell, such as the cell center possibly being outside the cell volume itself. Cell quality will therefore suffer significantly, and it destroys either the mesh quality test or the solver later on if quality is ignored.

Would the following strategy perhaps solve anything: after the snapping phase, any patch faces that require layer growth get triangulated or split into less twisted faces if their twist is larger than a specified value (as a triangle has a twist of 0).

Also, looking at other code such as StarCCM+, I can see that the patch faces tend to get subdivided when twist is significant. Unfortunately I do not understand the code well enough to be able to contribute directly, but I would be willing to test any improvements.

seaspray

2016-01-06 22:09

reporter   ~0005804

GeckoVM,

This is a very interesting observation. My input geometries were typically STL data, so triangulated by definition. Twisted faces would be produced by the intersection of this triangulated geometry and the hexahedral core mesh and subsequent processing/simplification of the wall mesh.

StarCCM+ begins by offsetting the wall surface once, by the thickness of all the layers. The wall surface can be first remeshed to improve its properties and this does indeed appear to address face twist.
Offsetting a non-concave surface is trivial, but not so otherwise as some vertices may need to be shifted or collapsed in places. SHM seemed to be able to achieve this quite well however in my "single extruded layer approach".
I believe a lot of the building blocks needed to reverse the meshing sequence and layer generation process as I was describing earlier are there.
I also wish I had more familiarity with the internal code structure in order to be able to undertake such changes.

In the meanwhile, cfMesh is an alternative open-source OF mesher that has been making very promising progress. The stumbling block for me so far has been with anisotropic refinement. cfMesh produces much better layers and runs much faster than SHM, but SHM has better anisotropic refinement capability as long as inflation layers are not required. This means I can't make use of either code at the moment.


Chris,

Thank you for your comment and strongly supporting the public release of confidential commercial developments. After a most entertaining conversation I had with a representative of engys (helixMesh, derived from SHM) some 18 months ago, I really would like to see this code finally coming out.
To this effect, I want to quote here below some of the text found at the link you provided above:

"Publishing the Source Code

If you have the source code of a privately distributed, modified version of OpenFOAM, please distribute it to the public. If you need assistance with that, or would prefer to distribute it through the OpenFOAM Foundation, please contact the OpenFOAM Foundation."

If you happen to have access to a mature native OpenFOAM mesher, please send the source code to the OpenFOAM Foundation.

henry

2016-02-02 18:28

manager   ~0005876

Rewriting snappyHexMesh will require significant funding.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
2014-08-19 05:34 seaspray New Issue
2014-08-19 05:35 seaspray File Added: SHIP.stl
2014-08-19 05:36 seaspray Tag Attached: Mesh
2014-08-19 05:36 seaspray Tag Attached: snappyHexMesh
2014-08-20 16:33 user4 File Added: layers.png
2014-08-20 17:02 user4 Note Added: 0003212
2014-08-20 21:41 seaspray File Added: SHM-Hull.tar.gz
2014-08-20 22:20 seaspray File Added: DTC-Mesh-10-layers.png
2014-08-20 22:33 seaspray Note Added: 0003213
2015-12-15 11:51 chris Note Added: 0005763
2016-01-04 11:36 GeckoVM Note Added: 0005798
2016-01-06 22:09 seaspray Note Added: 0005804
2016-02-02 18:28 henry Note Added: 0005876
2016-02-02 18:28 henry Status new => closed
2016-02-02 18:28 henry Assigned To => henry
2016-02-02 18:28 henry Resolution open => suspended