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Make sure that the enclosure includes all of the features by visually checking (make sure to hide all the imported bodies so you only see the enclosure) and confirming no errors. Due to some trim/extend feature weirdness in the chassis, ANSYS did not throw a critical error but instead gave a warning and excluded the body from the enclosure subtraction.

Each time you reimport the model into Spaceclaim, double check coordinates for rotating components like the wheels. For some reason, they changed- and so when the xyz coordinates are not updated, the wheel boundary condition will be very fucked.

Meshing

Meshing did not take long. In fact, it was remarkably faster than our previous attempts, which was a very good indication that our model quality was sound. The surface mesh finished in >10 minutes, and after an “Improve Surface Mesh” task, had a quality value of 0.7. The volume mesh finished in <15 minutes, and after an “Improve Volume Mesh” task, had a quality value of 0.14[something something something].

Solver

The greatest issue with running the Fluent solver on a personal laptop or computer is that it gobbles up any available RAM and pagefile space very quickly. For 8 parallel cores, it took about 70Gb of RAM and pagefiles combined.

The most common solution is to increase pagefile space to provide more memory. If that doesn’t work, decreasing the number of parallel cores used by the solver will also decrease the required memory.