Ansys Fluent enables you to select portions of the domain to be used for visualizing the flow field. The domain portions are called surfaces, and there are many ways to create them. Surfaces are required for graphical analysis of 3D problems because you cannot display vectors, contours, and so on, or create an XY plot for the entire domain at once. In 2D you can usually visualize the flow field on the entire domain, but to create an XY plot of a variable in a portion of the interior of the domain, you must generate a surface. In addition, in both 2D and 3D, you will need one or more surfaces if you want to generate a surface-integral report. Note that Ansys Fluent will automatically create a surface for each boundary zone in the domain. Surface information is stored in the case file.

While you can create surfaces to visualize portions of the domain, you can create cell registers to visualize and perform operations on cell groupings. You can group cells by:

Cell registers are saved with the case file and can be used to display marked cells, adapt the mesh, apply poor mesh numerics, delete cells, and report on the cells.