This installment of the Cart3D tutorial will walk through the process of generating an unintersected component wireframe in VSP and then using Cart3D's intersect utility to process the geometry into a single watertight body. If you haven't built the Onera M6 wing, or you don't have your own geometry to analyze, you should go back to the geometry generation phase of the tutorial or you can download a ready-to-go Onera M6 geometry from the VSP Hangar.
Although Cart3D's intersect tool is very robust, there are some cases it does not handle. One of these cases is when surfaces of two parts are perfectly coincident. This situation occurs at the wing root of the Onera M6 model created in the tutorial; the root surface of the left and right wing halves are perfectly coincident.
One common fix for this situation would be to move the parts slightly (say 10^-6) in the spanwise direction so the root surfaces are no longer coincident. Since the wing roots are normally buried inside a fuselage component, the gap between the wing halves would be insignificant. However, the Onera M6 geometry has no fuselage and any positive offset would result in a gap between the wings and any negative offset would result in intersection artifacts at the wing root. Furthermore, demonstrating the intersect tool with two parts that don't really intersect is not very useful.
Consequently, for this installment of the tutorial, a pod component will be added to the geometry to play the role of a fuselage in the model. This obviously would not be appropriate for matching the Onera M6 wind tunnel results, but it should do well for the purposes of this tutorial.
As you proceed through the tutorial to mesh the Onera M6, remember that images have been included as thumbnails, so any place you see a picture, click on it for a larger version.
The VSP interface is the best way to set up and adjust the wireframe resolution, but once that is established, you may want to generate the wireframe from the command prompt.
To generate an unintersected triangulated wireframe from the command line, enter the following command:
vsp -batch infile.vsp -tri
This command will generate the unintersected wireframe and write 'infile.tri'.
Cart3D's intersect tool is used to intersect the triangulated components and create a single watertight body. This tool is more thoroughly documented in the Cart3D documentation.
If you copy the unintersected triangulated wireframe file from VSP to 'Components.tri' you can run Cart3D's intersect utility with no command-line options. Otherwise, execute intersect with the following command:
intersect -i infile.tri
This command will intersect the components in 'infile.tri' and will write the result out to 'Components.i.tri' ready for analysis.
Once you have successfully intersected the model, continue to the Cart3D Setup Tutorial.
Or, feel free to jump to your topic of choice.