HexMeshCylinders 0.0.3

Creates structured hexahedral meshes for OpenFOAM

HexMeshCylinders generates hexagonal meshes for OpenFOAM. It is restricted to volumes with radial-rotational symmetry, i.e. solids that can be described as a "stack" of cylinders.

I've created this simple tool after having problems with spurious currents (a.k.a. parasitic currents) in interFoam. I was working on microfluidics cases, but the results were not good because spurious currents were deforming the droplets. It is known that regular meshes can attenuate the problems with spurious currents, therefore I wanted to try that. I tried to create these meshes using blockMesh and gmsh, however, because my volumes were cylindrical (nozzles, reservoirs, etc.), I didn't manage to get what I wanted. So I decided to write this tool.

The problem I was working on was the formation of droplets out of nozzles measuring 50 micrometers in diameter. The regular mesh solved my problems with spurious currents. (I hope to upload a video of it soon).

Installation

pip install hexmeshcylinders

Usage example

The following example generates the mesh shown in the image bellow. For more demos, please refer to the examples folder.

from HexMeshCylinders import Stack
from HexMeshCylinders.Shapes import Rectangle, Circle

stack = Stack(cell_edge=.015, verbose=True)

stack.add_solid(
    shape2d=Rectangle(len_x=.8, len_y=1.2),
    height=1.,
    n_layers=20,
)
stack.add_solid(
    shape2d=Circle(diameter=.6),
    height=.8,
)

stack.build_mesh()
stack.export('/tmp/HexMeshCylinders/basic')

Requirements

Requires numpy. If you want to run the tests, you will also need to have OpenFOAM installed.

Meta

Gui Miotto – @gmiotto

Distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.

https://github.com/gui-miotto