Automatic. Higher order. Meshing. Care to learn more? Then next week plan on attending the ASME Turbo Expo being held in Düsseldorf, Germany. While you’re there Mikhail Grigoriev of Cameron, Compression Systems will be presenting the results of a cooperation between Cameron and Pointwise that led to the development of a set of automated tools for high fidelity higher order finite element mesh generation. These tools enabled Cameron to accurately predict the failure modes for centrifugal impellers, a challenging problem and the most common reason for impeller field failure.

Automatic higher order meshing was made possible through our Glyph scripting language. Glyph was leveraged to automatically generate multi-block structured grids for open-faced centrifugal impellers and elevate the order of the linear hexahedral elements. This work demonstrates the validity of quadratic finite elements for accurately performing both stress and model analysis for centrifugal impellers.

The side view of the centrifugal impeller highlights the blocking strategy used to generate the finite element mesh.

The inducer view of the centrifugal impeller illustrates the use of quadratic hexahedral elements. This mesh was generated automatically.

The title of the paper is “Higher Order Finite Element Meshes for Centrifugal Impeller Blade Analyses Using Pointwise” and will be presented during the 28-2 Developments in Finite Element Analysis Methods and Material Property Modelling session held on Tuesday, June 17, 2014 starting at 8:00AM.

If you’d like to learn more about this work, or would like to talk meshing, come by the CFD Beratung booth, #706. Ulrich Fuchs, a Pointwise distributor, and I will be there. See you all soon!