Pointwise announces the latest release of its eponymous computational fluid dynamics (CFD) meshing software in which the ability to rapidly generate layers of hexahedral cells has been significantly enhanced.
“The enhancement involves how the software combines high aspect ratio – anisotropic – tetrahedra into hexahedra,” said Dr. John Steinbrenner, Pointwise's vice president of research and development. “The new tet-to-hex agglomeration yields about a one-third reduction in run time, an increase of nearly 20 percent in high quality cells in the extruded layers, and almost a 30 percent reduction in the number of isotropic cells in the farfield.”
Near-wall and near-wake hex layer generation is the latest capability added to T-Rex (anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion), one of Pointwise's hybrid meshing techniques. The technique extrudes stacks of anisotropic tetrahedra off a surface mesh. A post-processing step combines stacks of tetrahedra into either prisms or hexahedra. In addition to reducing cell count and thereby CPU time, most CFD solvers compute more accurate answers with prisms and hexahedra in boundary layers and wakes.
Other features in Pointwise Version 17.2 R2 include new native interfaces to the Edge and LAURA CFD codes, updated native CAD format interfaces, and several user experience improvements.
Pointwise, Inc. is solving the top problem facing engineering analysts today – mesh generation for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The company's Pointwise software generates structured, unstructured and hybrid meshes; interfaces with CFD solvers, such as ANSYS FLUENT, STAR-CCM+, ANSYS CFX and OpenFOAM as well as many neutral formats, such as CGNS; runs on Windows (Intel and AMD), Linux (Intel and AMD), and Mac, and has a scripting language, Glyph, that can automate CFD meshing. Large manufacturing firms and research organizations worldwide rely on Pointwise as their complete CFD preprocessing solution.
