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.

John Dannenhoffer, Ph.D.

Syracuse University

Dr. John Dannenhoffer is a principle author of the Engineering Sketch Pad system and many of its associated programs. He has been an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Syracuse University since 2001. Before that, he spent nearly 25 years in industry with Pratt & Whitney, the United Technologies Research Center, and Carrier. He earned BS and ME degrees in Aerospace from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an ScD in Computational Fluid Dynamics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His active research areas include applied computational geometry, grid generation methods, indoor airflows, collaborative engineering, and computer-based instructional methods.

Smoothly fit curved surfaces to point clouds and faceted geometry for an improved mesh.

Converting Clouds of Points to a Boundary Representation

John Dannenhoffer, Ph.D.