If you are interested in mesh adaptation, high order meshing, structured grids, hybrid meshes, mesh automation, and meshing process simplification, those topics represent just the last month or so at Pointwise. Read on for the details including how you can learn about all those topics and more at next month’s Pointwise User Group Meeting.

Mesh Adaptation Using Pointwise

Mesh adaptation helps solve the age-old dilemma: if you knew the flowfield you’d know where to cluster the mesh but you don’t know the flowfield until you generate the mesh. We just published a case study showing how Pointwise’s mesh adaptation capability can be applied to a variety of cases including a jet engine inlet for which solution accuracy was improved by an order of magnitude.

Surface mesh on an ONERA M-6 wing before (left) and after (right) adaptation.

Head over to our website and get a copy of this case study.

Pointwise User Group Meeting 2018

We’re just a little over a month away from the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2018 on 14-15 November in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. You need to register and book your hotel right away to ensure you don’t miss these two days of meshing goodness.

The first day’s courses will bring you up to speed on the latest tools and techniques in the software including the recently released Version 18.2.

The DrivAer sedan was meshed using the updated T-Rex technique.

• User interface enhancements like the on-screen 3-D view manipulator and the radial-style context menu both put interaction and command access right at your fingertips.
• New “top-down” commands like Build Blocks and Draw Shapes help you create mesh topology virtually automatically.
• A slew of new and updated tools – Synchronize Spacings, Named Spacings, and more – give you more control than ever over where and how your mesh is clustered.
• Your linear meshes can now be curved and degree-elevated for use in high-order flow solvers.
• At least a half-dozen updates to the T-Rex technique for rapid generation of boundary layer resolving meshes improve mesh quality and robustness.
• Frameworks let you work on each part of your mesh in its most natural coordinate system.
• And much more.

Day 2 of the event features sharing of best practices and lessons learned as customers, partners, and Pointwise staff take the podium and present their work. Some of the topics to be discussed include

• High-order CFD solutions
• Topology optimization
• Boundary layer meshing
• Automatic meshing via geometry attribution
• 3-D printing and grids
• And much more.

Both days of the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2018 will be wrapped in our special brand of Texas hospitality. So don’t wait a moment longer – register today.

Pointwise Version 18.2

Just a few weeks ago we released Pointwise V18.2 with the ability to curve and elevate up to polynomial degree four meshes for use in high-order CFD solvers. This capability has been called “a watershed moment,” and “a potential game-changer.” You can read the full announcement here.

Q2 hybrid mesh for an intake port generated in Pointwise V18.2. Image made in ParaView.

But why wait? Customers have already begun using V18.2 for its high-order capabilities and much more. If you’d like to try Pointwise for yourself, request a demo today.

At The International Meshing Roundtable

Three of us just returned from the 27th International Meshing Roundtable in Albuquerque. My invited presentation on The Two Reasons Why Meshing Is So Difficult left the audience questioning “Why only two?” and “Why so many references to art?” Dr. Steve Karman’s paper on Curving for Viscous Meshes emphasized the challenges overcome in curving high-aspect ratio, 3-D, boundary layer resolving, volume meshes to high order.

Carolyn Woeber represented the Pointwise team that worked on the IMR’s meshing and poster contest entries in a celebration of the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. We used our two meshes from the meshing contest and combined them in our poster contest entry.

An unstructured, hybrid, high-order mesh was generated on a NURBS representation of a hot air balloon. The quad-dominant surface mesh and the surrounding T-Rex hybrid volume mesh were elevated to polynomial degree 3.

A structured, high-order mesh was generated on a faceted geometry model of the Albuquerque basin terrain. A coarse, linear structured surface grid and the corresponding volume grid were elevated to polynomial degree 2.

BTW, did we mention that these meshes were generated by an undergraduate summer intern who had virtually no prior CFD or meshing experience? Does your meshing software enable that kind of work?