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 Application	Meshing Methods	Suitable 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	own laptop or workstation (non-LRZ)
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	own laptop or workstation (non-LRZ)
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	ANSYS Fluent Meshing (large variety of meshing methods available) adaptive mesh refinement tet/prism Fluent meshing polyhedral mesh conversion native polyhedral meshing (MOSAIC technology)	ANSYS Fluent	LRZ Cluster System ANSYS Fluent Meshing can be used in scripted mode (TUI language or pyFluent scripted) on LRZ Linux Cluster compute nodes. 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.

ANSYS ICEM/CFD Meshing

Since there is no longer a remote visulaization system available, it became rather impractical to use meshing software on LRZ HPC systems. Never the less, ICEM/CFD is made available on login nodes and can be used in scripted mode on compute nodes.

> module avail icem

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

> load module icem/2025.R2

Run ANSYS ICEM/CFD:

> icemcfd