Editor's Pick: Overset Meshing Enhances CFD Analyses

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

All CAE disciplines have been hot lately, but perhaps none has been hotter than CFD (computational fluid dynamics). CD-adapco deserves a lot of the credit or, depending upon your point of view, a lot of the heat for the torrid pace of technological advancement recently. They've been busy, and their most recent step ahead is the version 7.02 release of their STAR-CCM+ multidisciplinary engineering simulation package.

Version 7.02 made its debut at the company's STAR Global Conference, which just wrapped up today. You might think that 02 means this is just a bug-fixing point release, but CD-adapco does not seem to operate that way. Rather, it seems that once they are secure with a new technology, they release it so that you can be more productive right away instead of sitting on it for six months or a year until everything else under development is ready. That's speculation, not something I know as fact. But what is fact is that STAR-CCM+ v7.02 has three cool new features.

The is first a new Overset Mesh capability. This capability probably earns the tag “gamer changer.” Overset Mesh lets you generate a mesh around individual moving objects – yes, moving objects – without making you wrestle to interconnect meshes manually and without making you fret over producing distorted cells. If you even fretted at all, since fretting assumes that you even tried to do this more than once.

To really get an idea of what Overset Mesh can mean for you, see it. At the end of today's Pick of the Week write-up you'll find links to two videos on it. They're 6 to 8 seconds each. Short, yes. Endless on the possibilities, however.

Next, v7.02 has a new Indirect Mapped Interface for conjugate heat transfer (CHT) simulations. What this interface is said to allow you to do is use non-conformal meshes between solid and fluid domains. A time saver for sure, but it also means that you should get more accuracy out of your simulations because you can specify the mesh for given regions without having to make them conformal at the interface. In other words, you can use the appropriate mesh for region A and a different, more appropriate mesh for B.

Finally, STAR-CCM+ v7.02 has a new Solution History feature. This gist of this is that you can review and explore the complete history of a simulation – your changing results and changing design configuration. You can record, store, compare, and visualize results from any analysis type. You can select which data is stored for each configuration or time-step, and you can record results from multiple simulations in a single history file and replay them.

More details on version 7.02 of STAR-CCM+ can be found in today's write-up linked over there. And really, you have to give those videos of the Overset Mesh a look. They're cool.

Thanks, pal. -- Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today's pick of the week write-up.

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