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I really recommend you don't solve on your first run, just mesh. Uncheck the solve button and let it run. What you're looking at is the top-line number of total cells.
I've left some model complexity intact, which means the mesher is going to take a little longer because it has that geometry to mess with, but the hope is that the mesh just glosses over it and it doesn't really worry about that.
We can look at the solver window, or we can look at the summary, but total number of cells is 596,000. So almost 600, 000 total cells that we have to deal with. And that mesh, took quite a bit longer than I would like it to.
Let's take a look at the mesh. Now you can show your basic mesh or you can go to this mesh node and show it, but my personal preference is to just create a cut plot because it makes it easier to explore. So what you do is it's a mesh plot, enable the detailed preview, and then you can drag it up and down and try to figure out what's going on.
Let's look at kind of the front of this contactor here. And you can see it's got a lot of refinement right around the edges of these holes. In fact, if we look at the basic mesh that's a full level 5 refinement all around all these little features.
So one solution to lots of refined edges is to simplify the geometry, but that's just not always feasible. I want tell the mesher to just ignore boring little areas like this that don't mean anything.
Let's take a look and see how it resolved around these slots. And I've got one, two, three, four across the gap. It's not doing it because of the narrow channel refinement. It's because of the small solid feature refinement level. The channel refinement did not achieve its goal. So not really where I wanted it to be.
I'm going to go ahead and click OK on that and I'm going to go fix it. If I increase the channel refinement level, that would fix the ability to refine these slots at a higher level, but remember when I said a channel is two opposing faces with a gap in the middle. Every slot, every opening, every hole, every, gap in between any of these connectors, those are all considered channels within the eyes of flow simulation. So increasing the refinement level for channels is likely to give us the same result as that small solid feature and just give us all kinds of more problems.
So I'm going to leave it at 2 which got us close. For advanced refinement, I don't want small solid entities refined to high detail. I'm trying to just get overall macro flow. Meaning the action is mostly going to happen in the areas where there aren't any solids. So I'm going to turn this down. In fact, I'm actually going to turn it off. I'm going to set it to zero for the tolerance and the small solid features. But what I am going to do instead is I'm going to refine all fluid cells one time.
Now that doesn't give us what we need for refinement in our lids, so I'm going to create a local initial mesh. I'll just grab all my lids and say that everywhere there's a lid, I want seven elements across the gap, and you can use up to three refinement levels to get there, to achieve that number seven. If you create a local mesh or a rotating region or an internal lid or anything like that, you have the option to disable the solid components as you're using it. I want these to be included so that I can use them as boundaries and then use them as part of the enclosure of the model.
Let's mesh this one more time. I'm going to manually tell it this definitely needs to be meshed. Sometimes you change a mesh setting and it doesn't recognize it's new. We have a lot less solid refinement level, but we got a higher refinement level only on the lids.
This one's going to solve quite a bit faster because it's not going through and having to do refinements on every single face. Instead of 600,000, now I'm at close to 100,000. And if I show my mesh, you can see that everywhere in the open, it's got a better mesh than it did before. I also have a much better refinement level on lids. This looks pretty good, and I'm not seeing a lot of wasted effort around these areas of detail.
So this is an efficient mesh that's ready to iterate quickly. And then once I'm done, I can go ahead and unsuppress and add complexity back in, knowing it's gonna solve okay.
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