North America’s Largest 3-D Printed Structure Started as a Mesh

While the folks at Pointwise appreciate the beauty and utility of grids, usually the computational meshes produced by our software are used as an intermediate step in a customer’s engineering analysis process and not as the final goal of the project. However, Branch Technology, with its novel freeform 3-D printing techniques actually turns these meshes into physical structures that can be used as building elements or as seen here, works of art. (more)

Unstructured Quad/Hex Meshes and Mesh Sizing Sources Coming to Pointwise

Pointwise V18 is about to enter the beta testing phase and is on track for release later this year. We are excited about the new meshing capabilities coming in this release, including unstructured quadrilateral and hexahedral meshing and sources for simple control over mesh spacing in a tetrahedral volume mesh, so we are providing a sneak preview here. Read on to find out more about these and other new features coming soon to Pointwise. (more)

Revisiting Output-Based Mesh Adaptation

Mesh adaptation techniques in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications have matured substantially over the years, yet still few people seem to be leveraging them to their advantage. In this article, some background on why you should be using mesh adaptation to make sure important flow features are resolved without an inordinately large overall cell count is presented along with an example using Pointwise and NASA’s FUN3D solver. (more)

Gridgen Approaching Retirement

Not many of us get to retire at 42 years of age, but for a computer program that is a long life. Consider that when Gridgen development began in 1984, it was on a VAX 11/780 computer and a DEC VT240 graphics terminal. Gridgen was groundbreaking software, but it has been far surpassed by Pointwise. So the time has come to announce that effective six months after the release of Pointwise V18, Gridgen will no longer be supported or maintained. (more)