Dr Mesh: STAR-Design

While thumbing through my postbag on these long hot summer days, I’ve noticed a number of you STAR-Design users champing at the bit to discover more about CD-adapco’s easy-to-use CAD package. Never Fear! Dr Mesh is here!

Retake control

A real time-saver is the “Ctrl” key that true to its name, gives you back control. Ever been halfway through defining a piece of geometry, or been operating in “Select” mode and found that you need to re-orient the view, zoom in or out, in order to complete the task? Instead of stopping and restarting, having changed your view, simply hold the “Ctrl” key down. This tells STAR-Design to temporarily revert to “View” mode, allowing you to rotate the geometry with the left mouse button, zoom in and out with the middle mouse button and translate the geometry with the right mouse button. If you are midway through defining a shape, STAR-Design will pause the operation while the “Ctrl” key is down and you change your view. As soon as you lift the “Ctrl” key, you’re back to normal operation.

Pick internal faces

Next, if I have geometry with internal faces, how do I select one the internal face? Right mouse button click does the job. In figure 1, you can see a box with a smaller box shape cut out if it. If I want to pick one of the inner faces I hold the mouse over the face and click the right mouse button. The first click will select the front face (as in figure 1). The second right mouse button click picks the closest internal face (figure 2), the third highlights the next face in line with the mouse (figure 3) and the fourth activates the last face, on the opposite side of the outer box (figure 4).

Running in batch

If you want to run your STAR-Design job in batch mode, there are two different ways of doing this. The first runs STAR-Design entirely as a batch job, so the GUI never gets started. This can be done with the “stardesign --batch < Script.inp > OutFile” command line option.

The second method allows you to run a batch file of commands once STAR-Design has been started. This requires the STAR-Design command line to be activated. All STAR-Design’s actions have an associated “command”, which is echoed to a “casename.echo” file in the run directory. You can activate the command line by using the “ --expert” option. Having activated the command line, the user can run batch scripts using the “ifile Script.inp” command.

Until next time,

Dr. Mesh

Dr. Mesh surgery is open. Please send comments and suggestions to dr.mesh@cd-adapco.com