It was Confucius who supposedly said “Study the past, if you would divine the future.” With that in mind, we looked back at 2017’s posts here on Another Fine Mesh to see which ones got the most views. With that data, we could aim to write more posts on similar topics during 2018 under the assumption that more views equates to more value for the reader. 

So here are the top 8 posts on AFM from 2017.

1. I’m Travis Carrigan and This Is How I Mesh: It’s only fitting that the editor, chief talent scout, and overall force behind our This Is How I Mesh series of articles makes the top list. I’ve been told more than once that these profiles of people in the CFD biz (including all Pointwise staff) are some of their favorite posts.
2. Why Cartesian Grids Are Good : This post from 2012 inspired by a Mentor white paper certainly has some staying power. The fact that it’s so popular is even more interesting to me because Pointwise doesn’t currently support Cartesian meshes. Well, unless you omit voxel meshes coming in Pointwise V18.1.
3. It’s Not Always the Mesh Generator’s Fault: 2012 must’ve been a good year for blogging. This post is less about deflecting blame and more about the inaccuracies of discrete mathematics especially for methods for computing the volume of tetrahedra. It also includes a favorite cause of mine – standardizing the method of computation of common metrics (e.g. cell volume) across all CFD software.
4. This Week in CFD (01 Dec 2017 edition): It’s unclear to me why this edition of This Week in CFD was so popular. But we’re glad you liked it.
5. Would you care for some CFD with that Pi?: Travis strikes again with this 2014 story about his work to port both OpenFOAM and SU2 to a Raspberry Pi.
6. Why CAD Surface Geometry is Inexact: I knew when I first hear Ben Urick tell his story about CAD geometry that I wanted him to share it on AFM and you all agreed by making his post the 3rd most popular of 2017. But the inexactness of surface-surface intersections is something important for everyone who practices CFD on geometries from CAD software.
7. There’s More to CFD Convergence than Reading the Manual: The oldest post on this list is this one from 2011 which riffs on a NAFEMS publication on the topic of CFD solver convergence. I’m guessing folks are having trouble getting their solutions to converge and are seeking guidance.

And the blog post with the most views in 2017 was…

1. Accuracy, Convergence, and Mesh Quality: This post summarizes a two-day workshop on the subject in Dayton hosted by the DoD HPCMP and the AIAA MVCE technical committee. I consider this one of the earliest events in the build-up to last summer’s 1st AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop.

Any other topics you’d like to read about in 2018? Email your suggestions to blog@pointwise.com. As always, thanks for reading.