The Continua toolbar contains tools allowing you to build and modify Cell3 components. You can create a basic Cell3 interactively, or form the components from existing curves.
The Extrude, Stitch and Splitting functions allow you to modify the Cell3 components and mesh any complex geometry.
Here's an overview of the Continua features:
Form Cell3 from Curves Form Cell2 from Curves Create Cell3 volume Extrude Stitch Split
Association is a powerful feature base within cheetahSTC which allows you to quickly build Cell3 blocks around your model, simply making them similar to the same structure as your geometry, and then associate these Cell components to your geometry. The rough Cell components you've created now exactly match your geometry and become the boundaries of your volume.
Associate Cell2 to Target Surface Associate Cell1 to Rail Curve Associate Cell0 to Anchor Point Select Associated Components Select Target Surfaces Select Rail Curves Select Anchor Points
Association is not limited to the boundaries either. You can create large Cell3 components to fill large blocks of your volume, then after completing the finer, more complex volumes of your problem you can associate those Cell2's to your outer volume Cell2 elements. Association significantly reduces the time required to produce hexahedral meshes.
The factors features within cheetahSTC allows you to control the number of hexahedral elements created. Increasing the factors will produce more hexahedral elements, and decreasing them will reduce the overall element count.
Nominal mesh size Set factors Increase factors Decrease factors Refine all factors Mesh element count
You can specify the factors for the Cell3 volumes, or directly specify a nominal mesh size required for your simulation. Boundary layers can be produced with the Densification feature under Continua, and here in the Factors toolbar cheetahSTC can report a current total hexahedral element count.
The Components toolbar of cheetahSTC contains an extremely handy subset of features. A lot of the time spent creating meshes is used selecting elements by rotating your view and ensuring the correct areas are selected. The Components toolbar allows you to select parent and children Cell components extremely quickly.
As an example, you may want to select all the Cell0 (points) that are used to define multiple Cell3 components. Selecting each point by hand is cumbersome, and time consuming even if layers are used to show and hide particular volumes so that a select-all function can be used. Instead, cheetahSTC allows you to select the Cell3 components, and use the Retrieve Cell0 feature to select all the related Cell0 components.
These features are used to reduce the time spent creating Cell3 models and hexahedral meshes.
There are multiple Display views available in cheetahSTC, these include analysis capabilities to investigate mesh quality, environment mapping for high quality rendering, and mesh display options.
Here are the display modes extended by cheetahSTC:
