(The functionality already seems to exist to highlight geometry faces, e.g. It would be much appreciated if the FreeCAD developers could comment on the viability/ease of such a development.

It is the ONE piece of functionality that today (Jan 2015) would make FreeCAD very attractive as a geometry generator for CFD with OpenFOAM. So the piece of functionality in FreeCAD that would be hugely beneficial to CFD/OpenFOAM users would be the ability to name regions of part surfaces, and the inclusion of those names with triangulated surface export.

When the inside of this surface is meshed with snappyHexMesh, the resulting mesh will have boundary patches 'inlet', 'outlet' and 'wall' on which flow boundary conditions can be applied for a CFD simulation of flow along a cylinder (pipe). In the cylinder example, the triangles that make up one circular end could be labelled 'inlet', the other circular end could be 'outlet', and the curved part of the cylinder could be 'wall'. Call it what you like, it just means that triangles can be collected together under a particular name. Ascii STL and OBJ support 'regions', or 'patches'. FreeCAD isn't at the top of most people's favorite CAD tool list. It also allows the user to set up the simulation case and call the installed version of OpenFOAM. snappyHexMesh uses geometry input in the form of triangulated surface files in either STL or OBJ format. CfdOF allows the user to set up the meshing case and call the user selected meshing engine. The mesh can be generated within OpenFOAM using snappyHexMesh. This post addresses a very important topic for people using FreeCAD for engineering simulation, specifically computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with OpenFOAM.ĬFD requires a computational mesh.

Cfdof freecad