importing a mesh with a variable angle

Submitted by marketos on Tue, 08/03/2010 - 16:29

Hi,

I have a simulation where my wall geometry is a variable (eg where I want to change the value for the angle between two flat bits of my wall mesh)
Is there any way I could do this? I tried putting this as a variable in my stl file but I do not think it worked

eg
facet normal sin(${thita}) 0.0 -cos(${thita})
outer loop
vertex 0.02 0.0 0.0
vertex 0.06 0.06 0.04*tan(${thita})
vertex 0.06 0.0 0.04*tan(${thita})
endloop
endfacet

If there is no way to do this I guess I could easily go and manually plug in the values

Thanks,

George

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ckloss's picture

ckloss | Tue, 08/03/2010 - 16:54

Hi George,

I think the best solution depends on what you want to actually picture.
But if the motion of the mesh part can be pre-described as a function of time (as indicated above) and you just have one common edge, I think the best solution would be to split the mesh into two parts, which are rotated around the same axis, which coincides with the edge that is shared .
Solid rotation around an arbitrary axis in space is already implemented in the moving mesh feature (fix move/mesh/gran)

Is that what you mean? If you need something more powerful, it would be possible to (a) extend the moving mesh feature or (b) implement a new fix, depending on the complexity of what you want to do

cheers, Christoph

marketos | Tue, 08/03/2010 - 17:09

Hi Christoph,
thanks for the reply.
I actually want something much simpler than this- I am trying to do a parametric study where my angle thita is variable. So I will be running a large number of simulations and I was wondering whether I will have to create one stl file for each simulation or I could get away with having just one stl file with a variable's name inside it. I quickly tried the above and it didn't work.. But I guess it is no real problem for me to generate a large number of stl files if this is not possible.
Regards,
George