28.2 Zone Surfaces

Zone surfaces are useful for displaying results on boundaries. For example, you may want to plot contours of velocity magnitude at the inlet and outlet of the problem domain, or temperature contours on the domain's walls. To do so, you need to have a surface that contains the same faces (or cells) as an existing face (or cell) zone. Zone surfaces are created automatically for all boundary face zones in the domain, so you will generally not need to create any zone surfaces unless you accidentally delete one.

To create a zone surface, you will use the Zone Surface dialog box (Figure  28.2.1).

Surface $\rightarrow$ Zone...

Figure 28.2.1: The Zone Surface Dialog Box

The steps for creating the zone surface are as follows:

1.   In the Zone list, select the zone for which you want to create a surface.

2.   If you do not want to use the default name assigned to the surface, enter a new name under New Surface Name. The default name is the concatenation of the surface type and an integer which is the new surface ID (e.g., zone-surface-6). (If the New Surface Name you enter is the same as the name of a surface that already exists, ANSYS FLUENT will automatically assign the default name to the new surface when it is created.)

The surface name that you enter must begin with an alphabetical letter. If your surface name begins with any other character or number, ANSYS FLUENT will not accept the entry.

3.   Click on the Create button. The new surface name will be added to the Surfaces list in the dialog box.

If you want to delete or otherwise manipulate any surfaces, click on the Manage... button to open the Surfaces dialog box. See Section  28.11 for details.