Default units in Salome (Meca/Saturne)

Hi Forum

When working with Salome as a pre-processor, either for Aster, for Saturne or for OpenFOAM, whar are the default physical dimensions of Salome ( or Salome-Meca )...? My intuition says it is mm ( strange choice, most solvers use a coherent system of units, most engineering community adheres to SI... ) am I right...? if it is mm for linear dimension, what is the default unit for pressure, is it N/mm^2 or MPa... or is it other unit like kgf/mm^2... or whatever...?

BRGDS

Alex

Hi Kees

Thanks for your reply, I only asked because most of the commercial CAD packages default to some default unit, ProEngineer, SolidWorks, Autodesk Inventor, etc.

Which poses a problem, ( this is why i made this post in the first place ) :

If I import something that i built in a commercial package ( This happened with Autodesk Inventor ) to be part of an assembly or be meshed inside Salome ( Meca ), the default sizes are multiplied by a factor of 1000. The Salome version I am talking about is 3.2.9 i think... didn't try with other versions, because I no longer need to import stuff... I build/mesh most of my designs in Salome...

Seems to me like salome "presumes" that my default unit in the stl file was m, ( whict in fact it was ) and assumed the unit of mm without performing a conversion ... I bit weird i may say...

Didn't this ever happen to you or anybody in this forum...?

I was meshing a T-Junction to be analyzed in OpenFOAM... Obviously that the velocity/pressure fields resulting from the icoFoam ( incompressible viscous laminar flow solver from OpenFOAM ) run were way off from physical reality...

This was about two years ago... never reproduced this quirk again, but since I plan to use Salome in serious engineering design work, I must know how it works...

Alex

BRGDS

Alex<br /><br />Post edited by: Alex, at: 2009/10/14 17:33