Refine the Block Mesh

In order to successfully mesh the Ahmed body, we need to add one refinement region to the block mesh generated in the previous step. To do this, go to the Refine Mesh tab. The tab has three sections organized vertically, labeled Refinement Directions, Refinement Regions, refineMesh. We will be using the second and third sections.

1. Create Refinement Region

The Refinement Regions section is slightly different than other parts of the user interface. In this section, you create one or more attribute instances, each representing one region in the mesh to apply a 2:1 edge refinement (splitting each hexadral cell by 8).

For the Ahmed Body, we need one refinement region. In the Refinement Regions section, find and click the New button to create an attribute instance. A panel to edit its features appears below - you might have to scroll down to see it entirely. Enter these values for the Box coordinates:

Position: -1.0   0.0  -0.6
Scale:     5.0   1.0   1.2

2. Run refineMesh

In the bottom section of the Refine Mesh tab, click the Run refineMesh button and wait for the dialog to finish, which should only take a few seconds. When complete, the last line in the dialog is “All refineMesh processing steps completed”.

Note

The refineMesh utility overwrites the block mesh and is NOT idempotent. If you run refineMesh twice you will refined the same region two times. If you make a mistake on this page, go back to the Block Mesh tab and rerun the blockMesh utility before running refineMesh again.

3. Display the Mesh

Click the Reload Data to display the refined mesh. To see the refined region, rotate the view so that you can see the bottom side.

Before moving to the next tab, click the Hide Data button.