Snapping

The snapping phase attempts to adapt the castellated mesh to conform to the input geometry. These controls are located in the snapControls sub-dictionary.

Snapping involves projecting and morphing the mesh to, e.g. the surfaces and features, in an iterative process. If the adaptations invalidate the mesh quality criteria the step is undone and replayed using modified parameters. The sequence ensures that the resulting mesh achieves a minimum quality, at the expense of full geometry conformation.

The good practice is to start with the default values and adjust them only after inspecting the mesh.

The parameters need to be set for snapping onto the surfaces and features separately.

The algorithm first smooth the mesh on the patches and in the volume. Then, in the morphing stage displace the vertexes towards the surface. Only those vertexes are attracted to the surface which are located in the region defined by the local edge length multiplied by the tolerance entry from the snapControls dictionary (by default set to 2).

If the mesh quality is violated, vertices are moved back in a given fraction of the step (keyword errorReduction in the snappyHexMeshDict.meshQualityControls dictionary). After mesh quality check the next attempt to move the point towards the geometry takes place. This process is repeated until the maximum number of iterations is reached. Each step is reversible.

After the successful snapping or running out of iterations mesh is cleaned from unnecessary non-orthogonal planar faces.

snapControls
{
    nSmoothPatch    3;
    nSmoothInternal $nSmoothPatch;
    tolerance       2.0;
    nSolveIter      30;
    nRelaxIter      5;

    // Feature snapping

        nFeatureSnapIter 10;
        implicitFeatureSnap false;
        explicitFeatureSnap true;
        multiRegionFeatureSnap false;
}

Snapping on features

The mesh is snapped to the features after the surface snapping step. While during the surface snapping the points are displaced in the normal direction to the surface, displacement to the edge is more complicated. Therefore more iterations are typically needed.

Features may be specified explicitly using surfaceFeatureExtract utility which creates the eMesh file (located in constant/triSurface directory) with the feature line specification. Other option is to use implicit feature definition. In such case snappyHexMesh does not read eMesh file and defines the sharp edges itself. Implicit algorithm behaves correctly on simple meshes without sharp corners and baffles.

Figure shows the different result with explicit (left) and implicit (right) feature snapping. Picture shows mesh snapped on the baffle patches representing the break disks. Implicit snapping does not capture properly smooth edges.

A Practical example of implicit feature snapping is in the tutorial:

Keywords


nSmoothPatch [label]

Number of smoothing iterations along the surface


nSmoothInternal [label]

Number of iterations for internal smoothing to reduce non-orthogonality at the face of refinement (effectively making the faces non-planar). Default value is zero.

effect of internal smoothing

tolerance [scalar]

Multiplied by local cell-edge length specifies region along the surface within which the points are attracted by the surface


nSolveIter [label]

Number of mesh displacement iterations


nRelaxIter [label]

Number of relaxation iterations during the snapping. If the mesh does not conform the geometry and all the iterations are spend, user may try to increase the number of iterations.


nFeatureSnapIter [label]

Number of relaxation iterations used for snapping onto the features. If not specified, feature snapping will be disabled.


implicitFeatureSnap [boolean]

Switch turning on the implicit feature specification. Default is false.


explicitFeatureSnap [boolean]

Snap mesh onto the feature lines defined in eMesh file. Default is true.


multiRegionFeatureSnap [boolean]

When using explicitFeatureSnap and this switch is on, features between multiple surfaces will be captured. This is useful for multi-region meshing where the internal mesh must conform the region geometrical boundaries. Default = false.


nFaceSplitInterval [label]

Existing cell edges are aligned with feature lines by default. Unsuccessful alignment will result in concavity which consequently will lead to non-orthogonality on the extruded mesh at the layer adding phase. Where the mesh quality fails the extrusion is disabled. Resulting in no prismatic layer coverage in the area. To create an edge on the volumetric mesh aligned favourably with the features nFaceSplitInterval parameter may be used. The settings is typically followed by the layerTerminationAngle and detectExtrusionIsland parameters in addLayerControls dictionary.

Sets the interval of iterations. Avoid using the splitting from the first iteration by setting the parameter to one half of the nFeatureSnapIter parameter Default = -1 (disabled).


detectBaffles [boolean]

Explicitly turn on/off detecting baffle edges. Default is true.


releasePoints [boolean]

Releasing attraction close to a feature to allow more freedom for displacement. Default is false.


stringFeatures [boolean]

Walk along the the feature edges to identify connected feature edges. Default is true.


avoidDiagonal [boolean]

Avoid attraction of points across the diagonal of the face which would result in a collapsed face. Default is false.


concaveAngle [scalar]

Angle at which the face is too concave and will be split. Default is 45 deg.


minAreaRatio [scalar]

Do not split a face if its area ratio is smaller than the given value. Default is 0.3.


detectNearSurfacesSnap [boolean]

Disable snapping to opposite near surfaces, default true.


baffleFeaturePoints

Optionally construct baffle features (110 deg hard-coded angle) and snap them in addition to feature edge snapping


strictRegionSnap

Attract points only to the surface they originate from. This can improve snapping of intersecting surfaces. Default is false.



Would you like to suggest an improvement to this page? Create an issue

Copyright © 2016-2017 OpenCFD Ltd.

Licensed under the Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License