Editor's Pick of the Week, 15 in a Series

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

It is easy to make a mess of things preprocessing a model for CFD analysis, especially when you have to struggle with file interoperability issues. Pointwise’s Gridgen meshing toolkit is designed to make it easier to create accurate and reliable meshes out of things that you want to analyze. Just out in Version 15.11, Pointwise has enhanced Gridgen with improved native CAD readers (NCRs) to make CAD interoperability easier and more reliable.

Pointwise offers NCRs for importing geometry directly from such major file formats as CATIA V4 and V5, Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, UG NX 4, STEP, STL, and, with this release, HP-UX. Not that you have to have seats of these platforms in-house. Gridgen can import a CAD model in its native format without repair and export a mesh in native format for ANSYS CFX, Fluent, Star-CD, and other solvers. It even has a scripting language so that you can customize it, and, through a special arrangement with CADNexus, Gridgen can access files from SolidWorks, Parasolid, OpenCASCADE, and other CAD systems directly.

Because of its tight interoperability with native CAD formats, Gridgen lets you generate high-quality structured hex, unstructured tet, and hybrid meshes that require minimal repairs. Still, there are always things to repair. To ensure that the quality of your mesh meets your standards, Gridgen comes with a bunch of diagnostic tools that, for example, let you examine cell size, cell-to-cell size variation, aspect ratio, and boundary resolution. You can do this one cell at a time or you can define criteria that flag only those cells coming up short. You can even monitor quality as the mesh generates.

If you want an accurate CFD solution, you have to start with an accurate, high-quality, and reliable mesh. That’s what Gridgen does for you, saving you days of muddling with mesh repair in the process.

Go to today’s Pick of the Week write-up to learn more about Gridgen Version 15.11. There you’ll find the link to sign up for an evaluation copy so that you can see for yourself how Gridgen makes it easy to make a mesh out of things.

Thanks, Pal – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering magazine