CMS Overview
Cubit Meshing Suite – CMS is the result of an internal R&D project developed to enhance and standardize the processes associated with preprocessing in CFD Analysis.
The Cubit FDD Team works on innovative and diversified topics, which is important for the team to gain confidence and competence in various issues. In previous years, the drawback of this workflow was linked to process standardization: due to changing reference models for the team’s analyses, achieving a proper standard was difficult.
In the first half of 2024, Cubit invested some of its resources in developing a strategy to handle the surface mesh generation of different models that the team may work with.
CMS Core Aspects
Cubit Team identified some issues to be solved during the CMS development:
Time:
- Problem: Time is always a critical factor. Cubit Team needed to reduce overall pre-processing time, as it is a major concern in CFD.
- Solution: The CMS needed to be fully automated to ensure the most efficient use of resources.
New Standard:
- Problem: Previously, the meshes were manually created, and they were based on triangles without any structured feature recognition.
- Solution: CMS had to be developed to work with quadrilateral-dominant meshes generated within a batch mesh approach to properly handle feature recognition.
Adaptability:
- Problem: The Cubit FDD Team deals with a wide variety of geometries, differing in type and reference lengths.
- Solution: CMS had to be developed to handle different types of geometries with a built-in parameterized approach to successfully mesh models of varying lengths.
User Friendliness:
- Problem: CFD learning process for mesh generation for new users relied on experienced users.
- Solution: The algorithm needed clear guides to provide comprehensive training for new users.
CMS Development
To meet the requirements, the team first focused on creating models related to marine, air, and ground transportation. After choosing a specific model to represent each type of vehicle, a batch mesh scenario was created for each vehicle type, and then adjusted and refined to establish the best mesh generation rule.
To handle the adaptability requirement, the Batch Mesh Scenarios have been then parametrized to adjust the mesh reference values with respect of the reference length of the model.
After completing the Batch Mesh Scenarios, user-friendly GUIs were developed to guide users through the algorithm setup and daily usage.
CMS Achievements
CMS released to the team brought several achievements with respect to the initial requisites:
- The time required to obtain a complete mesh was reduced by 60%, shortening the overall time from workdays to hours.
- The total number of cells has been reduced, resulting in lighter files for improved transfer operations. The use of Batch Mesh approach and parallelization in meshing operations allowed for this reduction without losing geometric detail.
- The adoption of the Batch Mesh Approach significantly improved the overall mesh quality in terms of skewness.
- Users have effectively transitioned from operators to supervisors, improving their experience in this phase of CFD analysis.
CMS 2.0 and Future Developments (generic algorithm, wrapping, volume meshing)
CMS was initially developed to generate surface mesh for marine, air, and ground vehicles, but the team has recently expanded its capabilities significantly.
CMS was then enhanced with a second algorithm capable of generating meshes for generic geometries with minimal user inputs. This led to new potential future developments.
Volume Meshing:
CMS can be extended with a tool for Volume Meshing generation to create a comprehensive Meshing Tool covering surface to volume.
Wrapping:
Wrapping is a different approach to generating surfaces. Its main advantage is that it does not require cleaning of CAD-exported geometry. When combined with an automated approach like the CMS, it allows the team to maximize pre-processing time reduction.