Mesh generation for preCICE FSI training session

1

For the preCICE Workshop 2024 (September 24-27, 2024), we want to offer a training course showing how to prepare an FSI simulation with CalculiX and OpenFOAM.

We are currently thinking going with the FEM workbench of FreeCAD for the CalculiX mesh generation, as we need something relatively straight-forward that is easy to get on Linux. We are also considering other options, including SALOME (which, however, currently has issues on Ubuntu 24.04 / Python 3.12), PrePoMax (which seems to only be available on Windows) and some converters.

Any better suggetions we are missing?

Read Claudio’s analysis in the preCICE forum: preCICE Workshop: training session on FSI, Mesh generation for CalculiX - Non-preCICE - preCICE Forum on Discourse

1 Like
2

Gmsh can generate meshes for CalculiX directly (and save them to .inp format). But FreeCAD would also work. Btw. FreeCAD has add-on CfdOF workbench for OpenFOAM simulations. It just can’t perform FSI yet. Maybe preCICE could be integrated with it one day.

1 Like
3

Cubit runs on Linux and Windows.

You can directly export the mesh in abquas .inp
You could also download the calculix component and do the whole preprocessing for calculix in cubit. That’s also available for Linux and Windows.

Every command can be journaled so the whole preprocessing can be scripted.

2 Likes
4

Thank you everyone for your suggestions!

Last month, we presented a course module on preparing an FSI simulation coupling CalculiX and OpenFOAM via preCICE. We used FreeCAD to prepare the CalculiX mesh, and we directly edited the CalculiX configuration in a text editor.

You can find the material with step-by-step instructions on Zenodo:

7 Likes