Hello all,
I’m diving headfirst into the world of SALOME, but I’ve hit a snag when it comes to meshing those oh-so-tricky complex geometries. My current project involves building a finite element mesh for a model with intricate details and some seriously curved surfaces. I’ve been religiously following the tutorials and documentation, but achieving a mesh that’s both high-quality and computationally friendly seems like a bit of a dark art at this point.
Here’s where I’m hoping to tap into your collective wisdom:
Capturing the Tiny Stuff: How do you ensure those fine details get accurately represented without creating a mesh so dense it looks like a beehive on steroids?
Curvy Challenges: What are some battle-tested techniques for handling curved surfaces and avoiding elements that resemble warped parallelograms?
Balancing Act: Are there any hidden gems within SALOME’s settings that can help me strike the perfect balance between mesh detail and computational efficiency?
Speaking of hidden gems, are there any plugins or built-in tools in SALOME that can help automate or streamline the meshing process for these complex beasts?
I also checked this: SALOME Geometry User's Guide: Partition sf-dev, If Any tips, tricks, or resources you can share would be a lifesaver! Thanks in advance for helping me wrangle this mesh monster.
Thanks for help in advance… 
Your problem is very generic and difficult to directly assist without your specific model, geometry question, etc. I have been where you are. I taught myself ANSYS APDL over 20 years ago using their best-in class documentation. Salome does not approach this; not even close for graphical user interface (GUI). For the Python-driven mode (Text User Interface, TUI) the documentation is not much better. There are examples in the documentation though and the user community / developer staff is helpful if your questions are answerable (and not so open-ended). I encourage you to move to the text-driven method as quickly as you can, using the File->Dump Study method to output a Python file you can start looking at and edit. Google Cyprien / FEAforAll for YouTube tutorials if you have not found him yet. There are many different ways to tackle discretizing geometry to make a mesh. But there is little in the way of automation of this like “it just does it” as in current ANSYS Workbench and, I presume, Solidworks and others. You can buy plugin meshers to Salome that are robust, I understand, but I don’t know how to do this. Really stare hard at this issue and focus on what you minimally need to do with a mesh and get help with that. As you work on that, you will get a better sense of the ongoing payoff with this geometry / mesh framework and whether you should keep at it. You might also consider hiring time of some of the people on here. The people at Simulease who make the Windows port of Salome / CodeAster would probably be able to support you for fee. Good luck with your adventure and I hope this helps!
Can you share your geometries to mesh? Maybe if we can see it we could give you a better advice. Sometimes the tiny stuff is not really needed and you can defeature it in CAD, or you could make a submodel to capture such details if your solver allow it.
About curvy challenges, very often is better to turn off the midside node on geometry to avoid curved elements that some solvers doesn´t like it.
On hidden gems… to me the best is first good CAD modeling practices and the defeaturing tool on FreeCAD, defeaturing is the best way to achieve a good and computational friendly mesh.