6.3.9 Mechanical APDL Files

There are three different ways in which you can import an Mechanical APDL file into ANSYS FLUENT.

• You can generate a surface or volume mesh containing triangular, quadrilateral, tetrahedral, wedge, or hexahedral elements using Mechanical APDL or ARIES, and import it into TGrid using the commands described in the TGrid User's Guide and adhering to the restrictions described in Appendix B of the TGrid User's Guide. In TGrid, complete the mesh generation (if necessary) and then follow the instructions in Section  6.3.3.

• You can generate a Mechanical APDL volume mesh with linear triangular, quadrilateral, tetrahedral, wedge, or hexahedral elements, as well as with higher order elements like 20 node hexahedron, SOLID92, and SOLID187. Then import it directly to ANSYS FLUENT using the File/Import/Mechanical APDL menu item, as described in Section  4.12.2.

    The higher order elements will be converted to their corresponding linear elements during the import in ANSYS FLUENT.

• You can generate a Mechanical APDL volume mesh with linear triangular, quadrilateral, tetrahedral, wedge, or hexahedral elements, and then use the fe2ram filter to convert the Mechanical APDL file into the format used by ANSYS FLUENT. To convert an input file in ANSYS 5.4 or 5.5 format to an output file in ANSYS FLUENT format, follow the instructions below in Section  6.3.11. After the output file has been written, you can read it into ANSYS FLUENT using the File/Read/Mesh... menu item, as described in Section  4.2.

After reading a triangular or tetrahedral volume mesh using method 2 or 3 above, you should perform smoothing and swapping (as described in Section  27.13) to improve its quality.

Recognized ANSYS 5.4 and 5.5 Datasets

ANSYS FLUENT can import mesh files from ANSYS 5.4 and 5.5 ( .cdb files), retaining original boundary names. The following ANSYS file datasets are recognized by the ANSYS FLUENT mesh import utility:

• NBLOCK node block data

• EBLOCK element block data

• CMBLOCK element/node grouping

The elements must be STIF63 linear shell elements. In addition, if element data without an explicit element ID is used, the filter assumes sequential numbering of the elements when creating the zones.