Models and Quilts Let Analysts Work with Engineering Topology

16 March 2006 – Pointwise announces the latest release of their CFD meshing software, Gridgen Version 15.09, featuring the addition of solid modeling and solid meshing.

Solid meshing, the ability to import, assemble, and mesh solid models in the CAD data, complements Gridgen’s long-used fault tolerant meshing. Both approaches provide the analyst with tools for handling sloppy CAD geometry. Fault tolerant meshing avoids the issue of CAD repair by directly “healing” the mesh over gaps and overlaps through computations of proximity and adjacency. “Solid meshing takes a different approach,” said John Chawner, Pointwise’s president. “By importing solid data directly or assembling solids in Gridgen, the mesher is able to determine adjacency implicitly from the CAD topology. This makes the mesher much more efficient because it doesn’t have to compute proximity.” Also, in addition to supporting solid models, Gridgen V15.09 supports quilts, topologically linked surfaces that are to be meshed as a single unit. John Chawner continues: “Instead of working with literally hundreds or thousands of individual CAD entities that are the unfortunate result of CAD file generation and translation, the analyst can distill the geometry to the “engineering topology” consisting only of tens of entities. Instead of having 100 surface fragments that describe the suction side of a turbine blade, for example, they can simply work with 1 entity: the blade suction side.”

Other new features released in Gridgen V15.09 include a deformation-based scheme for pyramid cell generation in hybrid meshes, a new native interface to the FrontFlow flow solver, upgraded native interfaces to the FIELDVIEW CFD postprocessor and the Cobalt and STAR-CD flow solvers, and ports to AMD Opteron (Windows and Linux), and the SGI Prism.

About Pointwise: Pointwise is solving the top problem facing engineering analysts today: mesh generation for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Pointwise's Gridgen software generates structured, unstructured, and hybrid meshes; interfaces with CFD solvers such as FLUENT, STAR-CD, and ANSYS CFX as well as many neutral formats such as CGNS; runs on Windows (Intel and AMD), Linux (Intel and AMD), Mac, and Unix; and has a scripting language that can automate CFD meshing. Large manufacturing firms and research organizations worldwide rely on Gridgen as their complete CFD preprocessing toolkit. More information about Gridgen is available on Pointwise's web site, www.pointwise.com.

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