How are CFD cases stored and saved?

The CFD cases data differs significantly from other IDA ICE data. Hence, CFD data (CFD cases) are managed and saved differently from what you may be used to.

The life of a CFD case

This section gives an overview of the stages a CFD simulation goes through.

1. By pressing Create case in the CFD tab, input data from the IDA ICE model are written to the IDA ICE temporary folder on the Windows filesystem.
2. When Run or Mesh only is invoked, the CFD case data are
   1. uploaded from the IDA ICE temporary folder as a compressed archive to a file transfer area on the Linux CFD backend file-server (FTA);
   2. staged (fetched from the FTA and extracted) to a working directory on the Linux CFD backend.
   3. The CFD case is configured, meshed and or simulated inside the working directory, and
   4. when finished, the case data is automatically back-staged to the FTA. At this point the case is ready to be downloaded to IDA ICE (on the Windows filesystem) for visualization or saving.
3. When View is invoked, IDA ICE will look for the latest version of the case in
   1. the FTA, in which case you will be asked if you want to fetch this version (which is often the latest),
   2. and among the saved cases on the Windows filesystem.
4. When the building is saved or saved-as, as from the IDA ICE File menu
   1. IDA ICE for each CFD case checks if it is saved. If it is, a note is written in the log window; If it is not saved (or the case is changed since last save) it will be downloaded from the FTA and saved to the IDA ICE .idm file structure, as outlined below.

Saving a CFD case

When an IDA ICE document is saved AND it contains CFD cases, it will allways be saved unpacked. That is, if the IDA ICE case originally was saved as building1.idm, it will upon Save be stored as one file building1.idm and one folder building1/. The CFD cases will then be located in a subfolder to the bulding1/ folder. Each CFD case is there stored as a zipped archive, named with the same unique hash that is the internal case ID in IDA ICE. The file structure of a saved IDA ICE model containing three CFD cases is outlined below.

Saving a model "as"

When saving an IDA ICE model as a new name (File->Save as... building1b.idm), CFD cases already saved in building1.idm will be copied to the folder building1b/cfd/. CFD cases that were not already saved in building1 will be saved directly to building1b/cfd/.

Copying a IDA ICE model from one location to another

Copying an IDA ICE model from one location to another (including between computers) requires you to copy both the building1.idm file and the building1/ folder. So if building1 is manually copied to budilng1-copy, when building1-copy is opened with IDA ICE, the CFD extension will try to make sure that the CFD case table is updated with information about this new location.