We’re happy to report that NASA has “selected for negotiation” our applied research team’s proposal “High Order Mesh Curving and Geometry Access.”  Pending negotiations, work may begin in the second quarter of 2018.

As you may know, Pointwise has been developing methods for the generation of high-order, curved meshes for several years. We published an AIAA paper back in 2016 summarizing the then-current state of the work in our newsletter: High Order Mesh Generation at Pointwise.

Should this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II contract be successfully negotiated and awarded (“selected for negotiation” means we passed the technical hurdle and now just have to take care of the business details) we will be enhancing our methods in several significant ways.

Pointwise’s current mesh curving technology was used to generate this quadratic mesh with prisms and tetrahedra for a generic spacecraft lander from the ESP gallery of geometries. Image created using ParaView.

First, we’ll continue making enhancements to the basic algorithms for curving high-order surface elements and blending that curvature onto the mesh’s interior.

Second, we’ll be exploring how the mesh method can be closely coupled with a CFD solver running in an HPC environment for h-p adaptation.

Finally, because the curving process obviously involves the geometry model, we have ideas on how a CFD solver can maintain mesh-to-geometry linkage in an HPC environment.

Here comes the caveat: because this is research, what comes out at the end of the process isn’t always what you had planned on in the beginning.

While this research is underway, we plan to move our current degree elevation and mesh curving capabilities into the production version of Pointwise (release date unknown at this time).

For more details, see the formal announcement on our website.

If in advance of production level mesh curving you’d like to give Pointwise a try for your linear meshing, request a free trial license today.