Creating volume mesh from Imported Surface Mesh without Geometry

Hi, Joel,

Thanks a lot for the answer. I did use Netgen in the past. I also have heard of Tetgen, but, never used it.

This is what I am looking for:

I would like to do a conjugate heat transfer which includes solid elements for conduction and air domain for convection. Quite often, my solid geometries are complex.

I would like to mesh the solid parts (could be several parts) first. Then, build an air volume around the solid parts, cut out the solid pasts volume so that I am left with pure air volume. I would like to use the surface mesh from the solid parts to mesh the volume of air. Most solvers requires that the common faces between air and solid parts mactch (including nodes/elements).

stl file includes nodes/facets representing the surfaces of solid volumes. But, I cannot use these nodes as my mesh.

Is this doable?

I will think that either netgen or gmsh mesh the surfaces first, then, used these nodes to mesh the whole volume.

phsieh2005

From what I see, you can surface mesh IGES geometry in gmsh if you like.

In addition, you can apply the ideas I mentioned in the previous posts to very many different surface mesh formats including UNV. So you are not limited to STL.

In addition, gmsh uses external libraries including both NetGen and TetGen to volume mesh. So there is no need to use these packages seperately. Gmsh also has some surface meshing algorithms built in again coming from other packages. So overall gmsh provides a nice interface to access all your open source alternatives.

I think at this point it is best for you to contact the GMSH developers/support for additional tips on what you want to do. After all, I am a new user with less then 1 month on GMSH.

You could consider using Salome if you are starting from IGES or GEOMETRY files, rather than surface facetization (mesh) data. It allows you to control both surface and volume meshing...

AlbCem