In this brief tutorial walkthrough, we map a Simcenter Femap grid to a solution in STAR-CCM+ with the intent of exporting pressure loads from STAR-CCM+ to Femap.

Here’s the process in STAR-CCM+:

File / Import / Import CAE Model

This brings in your Nastran mesh and creates a bunch of stuff that could be used to perform a co-link simulation (FSI) – but we'll ignore that for now.

This is the trick – right-click on what was imported model node and you can then Map Data.

And this is the magic screen.  You should make up a separate region of all the surfaces that you want to capture pressure data (Boundaries).  The Imported Surfaces is just the “free surfaces” of the mesh and STAR-CCM+ does that for you automatically.

Then you have pressure as a default -

Then you go back to the same node and Export the Mapped Data.  Be careful and don’t forget to select your FieldFunction that you want to export (the second tab):

And your pressure loads are exported and can be imported into FEMAP:

Hopefully this helps users in exporting pressure loads from STAR-CCM+ to FEMAP.

BONUS MATERIAL:

Here’s our virtual wind tunnel with a “blade”:

Pressure mapped to Nastran and then ran in FEMAP: