6.

4 Mesh and Mesh metrics

There are certain parameters like orthogonal quality,skewness,aspect ratio,smoothness which

determines the mesh quality and has a significant impact on the accuracy & stability of the solution
and computational time. One of the important parameter that influences the quality irrespective of
the type of elements used in mesh is 'Skewness'

Skewness Calculation: Skewness is the Angular Measure of Element quality with respect to the
Angles of Ideal Element Types. It is one of the Primary Qualities Measures of Mesh. Skewness
determines how close to ideal (i.e., equilateral or equi-angular) a face or cell is. There are two
different methods for calculating Skewness.
Note:The acceptable range of skewness is ''0 to 45 degrees'' beyond which the solution diverges
largely

Note: The acceptable Range of skewness is "0 to 0.5" beyond which results diverge largely and
sometimes the solution may not converge because of stability issues.

Pictures courtesy:EngMorph.com
 Influence of Element type

The element type also play an important role in obtaining the solution.Good solution in CFD does
mean obtaining the reliable solution in minimum amount of time and minimum computational
power.

Basic three dimensional elements are

Tetrahedron Hexahedron Prism Pyramid

Most preferred element types are Hexahedrons and prisms the reason being that using less number
of elements compared to other type elements for the given geometry, same solution can be
obtained. Sometimes even better solutions can be obtained.

From the above figure it is evident that it is better to use hex elements rather than tetrahedrons to
cut off the computation time.
One of the example case is shown below

The left figure shows the geometry meshed with prism elements(504 elements) and the right figure
shows tetrahedral elements(3652 elements) and also obtained solution are similar and can be seen
from colour contours.

Courtesy:Comsol Multiphysics

Conclusion: To obtain good mesh two criteria must be followed

 Skewness must be low

 Use high number of hexahedron and prism elements
 Mesh and mesh metrics of Fluid Domain

Most of the parts in the fluid domain is meshed with hexahedrons,but it is not possible to avoid
using other types of elements because hexahedrons are best suit for regular geometries but
tetrahedrons are very flexible for any type of geometry.

Hex mesh for channels

Tet elements for irregular geometries

The total number of

 Nodes- 1479393
 Elements- 1227470
In the graph skewness is indicated on horizontal axis and number of elements are indicated on
vertical axis.

Tet4- Tetrahedron elements Wed6- Prism elements

Hex8- Hexahedron elements Pyr5- Pyramid elements

From the above graph it is evident that number of hexahedrons dominate over other type of
elements, also number of prism and pyramid elements are negligible.

The skewness is also very less and and more elements lie in the regions between 0 and 0.13.
According to normalized angle deviation method 0-0.13 indicates a very good mesh quality .