There are two types of meshers available in Ansys Icepak: hex-dominant and hexahedral. The hex-dominant mesher is the default mesher. Hex-dominant is a robust and highly automated unstructured mesh generator that can handle grids of virtually unlimited size and complexity, consisting mostly of hexahedral elements but including triangular or pyramidal cells. The hex-dominant mesher can do everything the hexahedral mesher can do. It uses advanced meshing algorithms to allow the most appropriate cell type to be used to generate body-fitted meshes for the most general CAD geometries.

The hexahedral unstructured mesher is widely used and an appropriate mesher. However, for geometrically complicated models that include, for example, spherical or ellipsoidal objects, the hex-dominant mesher (the default option) will generally produce a better mesh than the hexahedral mesher. In fact, the hex-dominant mesher is required if your model includes CAD shaped objects, ellipsoids, elliptical cylinders, or polygonal ducts.

Additionally, an Ansys Icepak hexahedral mesh can be generated as Cartesian or unstructured. The hexahedral Cartesian mesher can create better quality cells for some simple problems, but may not approximate geometry that is either curved or not aligned with the model axes, as well as the unstructured hexahedral mesher. The Cartesian mesher will turn off O-grid type meshes around objects, and will use stair-stepping to approximate inclined and curved faces.

It is generally recommended to use Mesher-HD for most applications. Additionally the mesh setup (global or object based) is similar for the hexahedral and hex-dominant mesher except for the multi-level meshing part. Hence, for information on the procedures for hex-dominant meshing, refer to Hexahedral Meshing Procedure.