Cubit/Genesis/ExodusII mesh loader

[Yung-Yu Chen]

Dear all,

I just finished the first version of Cubit mesh loader.  I'd like to know how do you think about the new feature.

To learn the new loader, you can review the source at https://bitbucket.org/yungyuc/solvcon/src/23e198738d1d/solvcon/io/genesis.py .  For better understanding, you should also review the corresponding test files.  The follow scg command can be used to convert a Genesis/ExodusII file:

  $ scg mesh file.g file.vtk

You can create your own file and let me know if there's any problem on conversion.

After playing with Cubit for a while, I can say that it is a very neat tool.  Its GUI is very intuitive, but more importantly, it features a very easy-to-use journaling system.  An example journal file is at https://bitbucket.org/yungyuc/solvcon/src/23e198738d1d/test/data/cubic_t200mm.jou .

Cubit does have a potential drawback: I haven't found a way to generate mesh with mixed elements.  It generates tets and hexs without any problem.  The problem deserves more study.

Cubit can export the mesh to various file format, among which Genesis/ExodusII seems to be the most intrinsic one.  Genesis/ExodusII is based on netCDF.  Therefore, I've made a wrapper to the netCDF C library.  The wrapper is implemneted by using ctypes, in the way similar to how I wrapped MPI.  The wrapper makes SOLVCON depend on the netCDF C library.  You can 

  $ sudo apt-get install netcdf-bin libnetcdf-dev libnetcdf6

to fulfill the dependencies.  For more information about the file format, please refer to the docstrings in the related source files.

netCDF is a comprehensive library and format for array data.  I found it is pretty interesting.  SOLVCON's netCDF wrapper focuses on reading now.  Writing support might not be difficult to implement.

yyc

--
Yung-Yu Chen
PhD candidate of Mechanical Engineering
The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
+1 (614) 859 2436
http://cfd.eng.ohio-state.edu/~yungyuc/