Hi all,
I am new to Salome, but up until here everything was great and very intuitive. What I am basically trying is to create simple CAD models, mesh them and do FEM stuff with them (mostly with ElmerFEM). And everytime I try, I run into a problem during meshing. So I and need to export my model, mesh with some other software and so on… I am sure it should work in Salome, so it would be great if somebody could help me out:
Very basic example case: I have been following this 4min video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfMLtywHSr4
For this person, it works, but its also a 5 years old version.
So i basically try to create two cylinders with different diameter, and cut them such that I have two objects: the inner cylinder and a cylinder wall with finite thickness. I partition those two and arrive at one object with an inner surface at the desired place. Great! I explode the partition-object and can now select the sub-objects wall/inner cylinder as shown in the video. I then go to the meshing workbench. I create a new mesh and compute it with Netgen1-2-3D . Then I use the “groups from geometries” tool to create a group (volume) for the center and one for the wall. I get a nice continious mesh and with the groups I can check that indeed I have separate, but fitting, sub-meshes for wall and inner-cylinder. So everything is great? Not really. I know export the mesh as .unv file. And whereever I open it, it’s broken. ElmerFEMGUI knows the correct number of groups, but cant show which meshes belong to them. If I try to solve on the mesh, the solvers throws a broken mesh error. If you open the mesh somewhere else, e.g. FreeCad, the groups are gone/broken as well. Ok, at first I thought maybe there is just a problem with the export. But without the groups everything is fine. And also, when I try to mesh with GMESH in Salome (which I used to use beforehand), it never meshes the whole object but only on of the subgroups. So there really seems to be an issue with those and I cant figure out what is wrong? Is this known? Am I just doing it wrong? I followed exactly the steps in the video just to compare and what works for that person doesn’t work for me. Did something change with version and I need a different approach? Or is my installation somewhat broken? Or is it a windows ↔ Linux thing?
Thank you very much and have a nice week! 
Stefan
