17 December 2007, Fort Worth, Texas – Pointwise announces the release of Gridgen Version 15.11, the latest version of our reliable CFD meshing software. This latest release features upgrades to the Native CAD Readers (NCRs) for importing geometry directly from computer-aided design (CAD) file formats.

“CAD interoperability continues to be a pacing item for our customers’ applications of computational fluid dynamics in a design environment,” said John Steinbrenner, Pointwise’s vice president for research and development. “Accordingly, they have worked with us to develop a multi-faceted solution to the problem. The Native CAD Readers have reduced some customers’ geometry preprocessing time from days to hours by importing data from the CAD system’s native format – and without using a license of the CAD software.” The NCRs for Gridgen V15.11 support Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3, CATIA V5 R17, and UG NX 4 in addition to CATIA V4.2.4 and STEP. Also, the NCRs are now available for HP-UX.

There are two other facets of Gridgen’s geometry preprocessing solutions. First, Gridgen has built-in support for standard and de facto standard geometry formats such as IGES and STL. Second, CADNexus has made their CAPRI Gateway compatible with Gridgen for direct access to SolidWorks, Parasolid, OpenCASCADE and other CAD systems.

Other improvements in Gridgen V15.11 were made to mesh quality diagnostics, solid modeling, and anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion. Gridgen’s license management has also been updated for compatibility with Pointwise, our next-generation meshing software.

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

-End-