I sure could use some help. I’ve taken on a gargantuan task that’s beyond any single person’s ability. OK, maybe just beyond my ability and my capacity. What I’d like to do is crowd-source a literature search for advancements in geometry modeling and mesh generation for CFD in the period 2014-2019.

A few weeks ago I accepted an invitation to write a paper and give a 30 minute presentation at AIAA Aviation in Dallas in June 2019. The topic will be progress made in geometry modeling and mesh generation in the five years since the CFD Vision 2030 Study was published.

Five years in thirty minutes.

What was I thinking?

CFD 2030 Integration Committee

The invitation came from the CFD 2030 Integration Committee, a newly formed committee within AIAA charged with promoting, monitoring, and fostering progress toward the CFD Vision 2030. I’m a member of this committee’s steering committee so I should’ve seen this coming.

Can you help, please?

Here’s where I need your help. I can’t possibly do a thorough review of five years of CFD-related geometry modeling and meshing in the time available. As I’ve gotten older I’ve also gotten slower, lazier, and dumber.

Therefore, I’m hoping you’ll help by emailing me (jrc@pointwise.com) links or references to published work that documents progress toward the CFD Vision 2030 goals in the areas of geometry modeling and mesh generation.

I’ll reference in the presentation everyone who sends me something unique that I missed in my own research.

Is crowd-sourcing something like this unethical?

I’m not asking for an analysis, just pointers to stuff I should read.

The 2030 Vision of Meshing

If you’re still reading, here’s a reminder of what the CFD Vision 2030 Study has to say about geometry and meshing. First, here’s what I think is the most succinct summary of the vision.

A single engineer/scientist must be able to conceive, create, analyze, and interpret a large ensemble of related simulations in a time-critical period (e.g., 24 hours), without individually managing each simulation, to a pre-specified level of accuracy.

If you drill down to identify the shortcomings of geometry modeling and mesh generation in particular you read that

• Generation of suitable meshes about complex configurations constitutes a principal bottleneck.
• Mesh generation phase constitutes the dominant cost in terms of human intervention.
• Current mesh generation software is unable to consistently produce valid high-quality meshes of the desired resolution about complex configurations on the first attempt.
• There is a lack of an automated linkage between mesh generation software and geometry model creation software.
• Geometry models are not suited for CFD.
• Tight coupling between CFD and geometry is lacking.
• Despite the deficiencies in current CFD solver scalability on HPC hardware, the situation for the surrounding infrastructure of pre- and post-processing software is even worse.

So I’m going to be writing about how all those things listed above have improved (or at least changed) since 2014 when the CFD Vision 2030 was published.

And all the while I’ll be keeping in mind that we only have 11 years until 2030 when all these complaints about geometry and meshing will be memories we look back on and chuckle politely while shaking our heads.

Email your suggestions here: jrc@pointwise.com.

And thank you.