ANSYS Meshing & ICEM/CFD

Meshing Overview

The ANSYS software suite is providing a large variety of different meshing applications, methods and approaches. The following table is an attempt to provide to LRZ users a short outline of the available meshing capabilities:

ANSYS ApplicationMeshing MethodsSuitable for...Recommended Computer System for Meshing
ANSYS ICEM/CFD

ICEM/CFD Hexa - structured hexahedral meshes

ICEM/CFD Tetra - unstructured tet/prism meshes

ANSYS CFX

ANSYS Fluent

ANSYS Mechanical

ANSYS Workbench

ANSYS Meshing (incomplete list):

  • Patch Conforming Tetrahedron
  • Patch Independent Tetrahedron
  • Mesh Sweeping
  • MultiZone Meshing
  • Hex Dominant Meshing
  • Assembly Meshing
    • Tet/Prism meshes
    • Cut Cell meshes (with hanging nodes)

ANSYS CFX

ANSYS Fluent

ANSYS Mechanical

ANSYS CFX
  • adaptive mesh refinement
ANSYS CFX
  • LRZ Cluster System,
    Adaptive mesh refinement is a solution-based mesh adaption, which is carried out during parallel solution run. Adaptive mesh refinement requires CFD setup on some initially provided mesh from other external source.
ANSYS Fluent
  • adaptive mesh refinement
  • tet/prism Fluent meshing
  • polyhedral mesh conversion
  • native polyhedral meshing (MOSAIC technology)
ANSYS Fluent
  • LRZ Cluster System
    As for ANSYS CFX, adaptive mesh refinement is a solution-based mesh adaption, which is carried out during parallel solution run. Adaptive mesh refinement requires CFD setup on some initially provided mesh from other external source.
    ANSYS Fluent Meshing can be applied in a script-based manner, so that it can be used for script-driven, automated mesh generation during the start-up of a massively parallel ANSYS Fluent simulation. This is in particular useful for extrem large meshes for massively parallel computations, where it might be difficult to find a single suitable machine with large enough memory to create the mesh in advance prior to its usage in a parallel simulation run. ANSYS Fluent Meshing is based on so-called "water-tight" CAD geometries, where the geometry is then initially represented by a triangular tesselation.
  • LRZ Remote Visualization Systems
    If the ANSYS Fluent Meshing is used in an interactive manner, than it is recommended to use the RVS. Nevertheless the meshign process allows the application of certain degree of parallelism.

ANSYS ICEM/CFD Meshing on RVS

Since meshing of a geometry is a memory intensive application, it is highly recommended to use the LRZ Remote Visualization Systems for running ANSYS ICEM/CFD. Furthermore, most meshing applications require hardware (OpenGL) graphics support for a reasonable user experience with the software.

Once you are logged into one of these LRZ Remote Visualization Systems, you can check the availability (i.e. installation) of ANSYS ICEM/CFD software by:

> module avail icem

Load the prefered ANSYS version environment module, e.g.:

> load module icem/2023.R1

Run ANSYS ICEM/CFD on the LRZ Remote Visualization System with OpenGL support:

> vglrun icemcfd

ANSYS Workbench Meshing on RVS

ANSYS Workbench and many contained ANSYS software components had been developed exclusively for Windows OS and only afterwards ANSYS made the attempt to provide ANSYS WB on Linux systems using Mono. Consequently ANSYS WB itself and some of the contained software components behave rather unstable on Linux OS, also the LRZ RVS is currently operated under an officially supported Linux OS (SLES 12). With the anticipated change of the LRZ RVS operating system to Ubuntu LTS in the near future, we expect that ANSYS WB and all software components which are provided in ANSYS WB exclusively can no longer be provided on a future LRZ RVS. Already today ANSYS Spaceclaim is not contained in ANSYS WB on LRZ RVS, since ANSYS Inc. is not providing a Linux version of Spaceclaim. Standalone software components like ICEM/CFD, ANSYS CFX, ANSYS Fluent and Ensight are not affected, since they are provided with GUI's natively running on Linux OS (not Mono based).

So therefore ANSYS Geometry Modeling (ANSYS DesignModeler) as well as ANSYS Meshing methods are available only through the platform of ANSYS Workbench. They cannot be run as standalone applications. ANSYS SpaceClaim is not available on Linux OS. ANSYS SpaceClaim is an application which is available on Windows OS systems only.
So, once you are logged into one of these LRZ Remote Visualization Systems, you can check the availability (i.e. installation) of ANSYS Workbench software by:

> module avail wb

Load the prefered ANSYS Workbench version environment module, e.g.:

module load wb/2023.R1

Run ANSYS Workbench on the LRZ Remote Visualization System with OpenGL support:

> vglrun runwb2

From within the ANSYS Workbench schematic launch the ANSYS Meshing application with appropriate geometry import (CAD file, ANSYS DesignModeler geometry modeler). ANSYS Spaceclaim is not available on Linux OS.