The March 2018 issue of Digital Engineering came across my desk the other day and one article in particular caught my attention. Written by Tony Abbey, the Siemens FEMAP with NX NASTRAN Overview, Part 2 article focused on meshing. In particular, Tony walked through the process of meshing a tie rod for an FEA analysis. Two things stood out while reading this article:
- It took 30 minutes to mesh using FEMAP.
- The geometry is available for download.
I thought it would be a fun exercise to attempt generating a similar mesh using Pointwise. I downloaded the geometry, imported into Pointwise, and meshed it to similar specifications in five minutes. Here’s how I did it.
This week’s news includes a couple of tantalizing meshing papers (including the work of Li and Barbic shown to the right). In addition, several conferences and events have been added to the calendar. 
There’s an article you must read this week from the SimCenter blog about Formula 1 aerodynamics and STAR-CCM+. Very cool, very enjoyable, and a great body of work. The rest of the news, due to time constraints, is unformatted and uncategorized. 
With the new Grid Import API in Pointwise Version 18.1’s Plugin SDK, you can now read virtually any mesh file into the software. 
We hope you will spend just a few minutes on our 9-question survey about geometry models and CFD mesh generation. It is open to everyone in the CFD community and we will share the results here after the survey closes. 
This week’s CFD news includes many people-oriented items including a podcast about women in CFD, a profile of a weather simulation researcher, the launch of an open-source CFD society, and the call for papers for a mesh generation user’s conference [hint, hint].
I started my engineering analysis activities after graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Milwaukee School of Engineering in Architectural Engineering (a long time ago) where my focus was on structural analysis. I spent the first 8+ years of my career doing structural analysis, CAD integration and design optimization for a variety of firms including: 
