Gridgen 15.09 Enables Solid Modeling

By DE Editors

Pointwise(Fort Worth, TX) has released Gridgen Version 15.09, a new version ofits CFD meshing software. A key new feature of Version 15.09 is said to be the addition of solid modeling andsolid meshing.

The company says that solid meshing—the ability to import, assemble, and mesh solid modelsin the CAD data— complements Gridgen’s long-used fault tolerantmeshing. Both approaches provide the analyst with tools for handlingsloppy CAD geometry, says Pointwise. Fault tolerant meshing avoids the issue of CADrepair by directly “healing” the mesh over gaps and overlaps throughcomputations of proximity and adjacency.

“Solid meshing takes a different approach,” says John Chawner,Pointwise’s president in a press statement. “By importing solid data directly or assemblingsolids in Gridgen, the mesher is able to determine adjacency implicitlyfrom the CAD topology. This makes the mesher much more efficientbecause it doesn’t have to compute proximity.”

In addition to supporting solid models, Gridgen V15.09 supports quilts,topologically linked surfaces that are to be meshed as a single unit.That means the analyst can distill the geometry to the “engineeringtopology” consisting only of tens of entities. “Instead of having 100surface fragments that describe the suction side of a turbine blade,for example,” says Chawner, “they can simply work with one entity: theblade suction side.”

Other new features released in Gridgen V15.09 include adeformation-based scheme for pyramid cell generation in hybrid meshes,a new native interface to the FrontFlow flow solver, upgraded nativeinterfaces to the FIELDVIEW CFD postprocessor and the Cobalt andSTAR-CD flow solvers, and ports to AMD Opteron (Windows and Linux), andthe SGI Prism.

For more information, visit pointwise.com.
 

Sources: Press materials received from the company.