Performing "Surface Wrap" Operation On A Dirty Ford Engine Using STAR-CCM+ Software
When complex geometric structures with several smaller parts attached to it are imported to STAR CCM+ software, the software automatically converts the geometry surface into smaller triangles, while doing so the software encounters several issues such as the Pierced face, Open edge, Face quality, Face proximity & Non-manifold errors. These errors for a very complex & industry scaled geometry can have thousands of such errors which becomes impossible to solve manually using the "Surface Repair tool". One such example is shown below.
The below is an image of a Ford Engine imported in the Surface Repair window. From the slide-out panel on the right of the window, we can see the total number of errors. These errors if solved manually will take up a lot of time & physical effort which can indirectly beef up the price of the product which is not desirable for the company. Hence, companies make use of the "Surface Wrapping" technique which is much quicker.
Surface wrapper: wraps the initial surface to provide a closed and manifold surface mesh from complex geometry.
For poor quality or complex CAD, this procedure ensures that the geometry is closed and of sufficient quality for generating surface and volume meshes. The surface wrapper comes with a tool for leak detection and is usually used in conjunction with the surface remesher.
Steps Involved In Surface Wrapping
STEP 1:- Rename the parts for convenience.
STEP 2:- Creating the surface wrap.
STEP 3:- Specifying which parts to Surface Wrap. For our case we would Surface Wrap the entire geometry since the errors are distributed evenly throughout the geometry.
STEP 4:- Involves us defining the quality of the Surface Wrap, starting with the base size, ensuring CAD projection is turned on & our volume of interest will be "External" since there's no wind tunnel.
STEP 5:- This step involves defining certain regions of the parts more coarse than the rest of the geometry. We do that by selecting the parts from the geometry we want to define & assigning them to "custom" values.
STEP 6:- Once the surface wrapping technique is completed we go back to the "Surface Repair" window to check the errors solved by "Surface Wrapper". From the below image we can observe that only the Face quality & Face proximity errors remain, which would be solved in the surface re-meshing technique. Since we can observe that there are no "open edges errors" present in the geometry we can skip the "Leak Detection" technique.
