If it seems like we’ve been sharing a lot recently about our work with our friends and partners, it’s true – we have been. During the first several months of “work from home” we chose to showcase a lot of cool applications of CFD with meshes generated in Pointwise. The applications cover automation, mesh types for accurate CFD, novel geometry models, optimization, adaptation, and more. So here they all are in a convenient, one-stop-shopping format.

Automated Meshing and Adaptive Re-meshing at Bombardier

This on-demand webinar (aka video recording) details the Meshing & Adaptive Re-meshing Server (MARS) they developed and which has been used to generate over 250,000 high-quality meshes since 2017. MARS automates the meshing process, reduces meshing time, and ensures consistent meshes across geometry variations no matter who is using it.

Accurate Performance Predictions for Marine Propellers

The purpose of the benchmark described in this case study is the validation of CFD simulation software TCFD® from CFD Support with the mesh created in the meshing software Pointwise® for the The Potsdam propeller test case (PPTC). The thrust coefficient, torque coefficient, and efficiency were compared to the advance coefficient over eleven operating conditions.

Simulation of in-flight icing on UAVs

Inflight icing is a severe hazard significantly limiting the usage of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) investigate icing on UAVs and develop mitigation technologies together with UBIQ Aerospace. This webinar introduces the issues of in-flight icing on UAVs and discusses differences to icing on manned aircraft, simulation of icing and icing penalties, and meshing of iced airfoils.

Pointwise Used in Topology Optimization of Automotive Components

ENGYS Limited, a provider and user of open-source technologies for computational fluid design (CFD) and design optimization, combined Pointwise high-quality unstructured mesh generation for CFD with Helyx Adjoint to provide efficient and effective topology optimization of automotive components. Combining Pointwise’s powerful unstructured mesh generation with Helyx Adjoint sensitivity based shape optimization enables fully automated performance-driven design shape evolution and optimization to meet target performance objectives.

Solution-Based Mesh Adaptation with Pointwise and ANSYS CFX

Simulation-driven design relies heavily on high-quality CFD simulation results. Mesh adaptation is an essential tool for controlling discretization error in your simulations. Pointwise provides a solver-independent mesh adaptation method that maintains adherence to geometry. Curious as to how Pointwise mesh adaptation can be applied to your engineering simulation workflow? Nick Wyman and Steve Karman from Pointwise along with Paul Galpin from ISimQ held a Let’s Talk Meshing Live Q&A about mesh adaptation to answer people’s questions on this subject. Watch this webinar to learn how mesh adaptation can help make your CFD process more efficient and accurate.

CAD-Based Design Optimization of a Race Car Front Wing

Can we identify the optimal twist distribution for the front wing of a race car that maximizes downforce without increasing drag? It turns out that we can. By using ModelCenter from Phoenix Integration as an integration platform, Pointwise to generate the meshes, and Altair‘s AcuSolve to run the CFD calculations, push-button design optimization was achieved. In fact, the model-centric process was built on parametric geometry so that a single mesh could be mapped effortlessly from one design iteration to the next and the final output is an actual CAD model that can be used for further analysis.

Application of Pointwise T-Rex Meshing and CFD Modeling to the Analysis of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (S-CO2) Power Cycles

Interest has increased in the S-CO2 Brayton cycle for new efficient power systems, but the ability to analyze these systems at off-design conditions is lacking. The complex analysis requires modeling of flow transitioning between liquid and gas phases with high-resolution meshing. Pointwise provided the high-quality meshes needed for high-resolution analyses of supercritical CO2 cycle machines using multi-species/multi-phase flow solvers to resolve the complex physics.

Converting Clouds of Points to a Boundary Representation

Watch and download the presentation, “Converting Clouds of Points to a Boundary Representation,” given by John Dannenhoffer, Syracuse University at the Pointwise User Group Meeting showing his techniques for fitting a cloud of points with a smooth, watertight, B-spline based boundary representation. This technology has been incorporated into Pointwise to allow higher quality meshing on discrete geometry. While watertight, analytically smooth geometries are ideal for generating high-quality meshes, many legacy configurations are represented by disconnected sets of faces, clouds of points, or combinations of these. This work demonstrates how such discrete geometries can be converted to smooth analytic boundary representations leading to increased mesh quality, which in turn improves CFD solution accuracy and convergence.