Wake Resolution Added to Pointwise's Hybrid Mesher for CFD Accuracy

FORT WORTH, TX - Pointwise has announced the latest release of its Gridgen computational fluid dynamics (CFD) meshing software, featuring an update to the T-Rex hybrid meshing technique that allows for the resolution of wakes and other off-body flow phenomena.

"T-Rex gives customers the ability to generate hybrid meshes for complex geometry with clustering in the near-body boundary layer region," said John Steinbrenner, vice president of research and development at Pointwise. "But accurate CFD solutions also require resolution of wakes behind tailplanes, wings and other off-body features. Adding baffles to T-Rex provides that resolution."

T-Rex (anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion) is an automated meshing technique that starts from a triangulated surface mesh and extrudes layers of high aspect ratio tetrahedra that transition to a more uniform mesh away from the body. The addition of T-Rex support for baffles (an existing Gridgen feature for resolving thin geometric surfaces) lets the user insert a triangulated surface mesh into the middle of the volume in the vicinity of a flow feature. T-Rex will extrude layers of tets from the baffle, thereby providing a fine mesh for accurately resolving the flow feature.

Also included in Gridgen V15.17 is further improvement of T-Rex's ability to combine, as a post-processing step, stacks of extruded tets into prisms to reduce cell count and thereby improve performance of the user's CFD solver. Specifically, this recombination now can be performed across boundaries in the grid's topology. In some cases, this has reduced the total cell count by 29.4 percent over previous versions of the software.

Pointwise, Inc. is solving the top problem facing engineering analysts today - mesh generation for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The company's Gridgen and Pointwise software generates structured, unstructured and hybrid meshes; interfaces with CFD solvers, such as ANSYS FLUENT, STAR-CD, ANSYS CFX and OpenFOAM as well as many neutral formats, such as CGNS; runs on Windows (Intel and AMD), Linux (Intel and AMD), Mac and Unix, and has scripting languages that can automate CFD meshing. Large manufacturing firms and research organizations worldwide rely on Pointwise as their complete CFD preprocessing solution.