Power to the users! You won’t find it plastered around the office, but you can be sure that it’s top of mind here at Pointwise. While the latest release includes more “push-button” solutions in our effort to make meshing invisible, you’ll also find a slew of features designed, in part, for the power user. One of these features can be leveraged to generate more efficient boundary layer meshes and is something we call Growth Profiles.

Growth Profiles is a macro capability to provide the ability to either quickly define a boundary layer element growth schedule via helper functions, or completely customize it if desired. Growth Profiles were released in Pointwise Version 18.1 R2 and can be accessed through our Glyph scripting language.

That said, we’ve made it even easier for everyone to access the feature by providing a ready-to-use GUI that exposes the controls necessary to automatically compute and apply a growth rate schedule for laminar and turbulent flows, as well as intuitively construct a custom profile.

Based on experience from our involvement in a number of AIAA sponsored workshops, as well from discussions with our customers, here are four reasons to use Growth Profiles:

1. Set it and forget it. Punch in your flowfield parameters for either a laminar or turbulent profile and let Pointwise compute out the specifics for you.
2. For wall-modeled LES. Create a custom profile where the first point off the surface is at a high y+ value and the layers after resemble a more typical boundary layer mesh.
3. Fully custom resolved cases. Specify a number of constant growth layers prior to any growth acceleration.
4. Overset meshing. Being able to customize the growth schedule on a per block basis provides the additional control necessary to provide better overset connectivity in tight gaps.

To try out Growth Profiles yourself, you can download a copy of the script from the Glyph Script Exchange hosted on GitHub by clicking the link below.