Use this panel to preview the specified boundary motion in the 3-D View before actually running the simulation. Before attempting to preview the boundary motion, we recommend that you make invisible the Geometry surfaces and make visible selected boundary surfaces, especially those that have moving-wall boundary conditions, and set the opacity of those boundaries appropriately. The icons on the Boundary Motion icon bar are: Play   , Loop   , Stop   , and Reset  . You can specify the duration of the animation and a point at which to preview, by entering a crank angle or picking a point in a plot of the cycle.

This option displays the "background" Cartesian mesh in the Setup interface, during the Setup workflow. This mesh display can look rough-edged, or untrimmed. The actual computation is based on the topology of this Cartesian mesh but takes into account the actual trimmed nature of the cells in various ways.

In addition to the boundary motion preview in the 3-D View window, the Boundary Motion Editor panel contains an optional display under Simulation Preview that provides a rough plot of various events and motions that have been set up in the project, including simulation start and stop, piston motion, valve motion, sparks, injection, and areas of dynamic mesh refinement (for automatic meshing). This option is only available for engine simulations, where a slider-crank motion has been defined for at least one boundary surface. By entering a crank angle in the Simulation Preview text box, a dashed line will be drawn indicating that location in the displayed cycle for reference purposes.