Bigger, Better Hybrid Meshes With New Gridgen Release

FORT WORTH, TX - Pointwise announces the latest release of its Gridgen software featuring new techniques for generating larger and higher quality hybrid meshes for computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

Gridgen's anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion (T-RexTM) generates a mesh characterized by layers of high quality, high aspect ratio tetrahedra in the near-wall region for boundary layer resolution and an isotropic tetrahedral mesh in the farfield. Because mesh cell quality directly impacts CFD solution quality, it is vitally important that the highly automated T-Rex method generate the best possible mesh. In particular, this new Gridgen release reduces the occurrence of highly skewed mesh cells in concave regions (such as wing-fuselage junctions) and also in convex regions (the trailing edges of control surfaces, for example).

This version also features significant improvements in providing a smooth blending of the mesh from the viscous to inviscid regions of the flow (i.e. the anisotropic to isotropic transition).

"Shortly after the beginning of the year and in close cooperation with one of our major customers, we laid out a plan to improve the quality of Gridgen's T-Rex meshes while enabling generation of the large meshes typically required for high-fidelity, full aircraft simulations," said Dr. John Steinbrenner, Pointwise's vice president for research and development.

"Through a focused development effort, we have been able to achieve both goals well ahead of schedule, thereby enabling our many customers requiring boundary layer meshes to benefit immediately from this new technology."

Mesh skewness reduction techniques include vertex decimation and step size attenuation in concave regions and addition of extrusion points in convex regions. Aniso- to isotropic transition was improved through vertex refinement, enhanced handling of colliding extrusion fronts and seeding the isotropic mesh with points generated by the extrusion algorithm.

Large meshes for CFD simulations of complex, complete aircraft including stores and appendages are easier to generate with the latest Gridgen release.

The latest release of Gridgen's T-Rex hybrid meshing technique improves cell quality throughout the mesh, but especially in convex and concave regions.

The new release of Gridgen, Version 15.14, also updates the Native CAD Readers to support CAD files from NX 6 and CATIA V5 R19 and adds support for 64-bit Linux.

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 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 scripting languages that can automate CFD meshing. Large manufacturing firms and research organizations worldwide rely on Pointwise as their complete CFD preprocessing solution. More information about Gridgen and Pointwise is available at pointwise.com.