Christian Atwood, an intern in our Technical Support team, gave his end-of-summer presentation today before heading off to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University to begin his freshman year.

Intern Christian Atwood and his mentor, Carolyn Woeber  – manager of technical support, at Christian’s end-of-summer presentation.

Yes, that’s right. Christian is a high school senior and will only be starting his college experience in a few weeks. So, what can a high school graduate accomplish at Pointwise? In his own words:

I worked on a CX-100 wind turbine mesh to be used in a “checkerboard” wind farm simulation. I started with the horizontal axis wing from the CX-100, applied a surface mesh with anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion (T-Rex) and built a near field block around each wing. This block was then periodically rotated around 120 degrees for a complete turbine. It will be used with a script that loads the turbine and places multiple instances of the grid on a plane. The completed wind farm will be presented at the North American Wind Energy Academy Symposium in September.

Front-end Documentation was developed for commands in the File menu in Pointwise. Using the user manual text, and making appropriate additions, I created an HTML document for each of the Pointwise commands I worked on.  The end goal is to create an online manual that users can access for information about the software. Also, this process taught me how to effectively capture GUI elements to create web pages that are concise and display only what they need to, aiding in user understanding.

I worked on testing the new Examine, Filter command coming in V18.1, that allows the user to set specific conditions for examining the quality of a grid. I was able to identify several issues that the Product Development team fixed.

I created a yacht mesh for the International Meshing Roundtable meshing contest. This mesh proved to be challenging due to cells with high aspect ratios and small volumes.

We wish Christian the best of luck at ERAU.

If you’re interested in an internship at Pointwise, watch our website: www.pointwise.com/jobs. We usually post summer internships in January.