How T-Rex Unstructured Meshing Aids Transonic Aircraft Drag Reduction

Aircraft manufacturers continually strive to design faster and more efficient airplanes. Reducing the aerodynamic drag of an aircraft produces a proportional reduction in fuel consumption. Predicting drag with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be very challenging, particularly for modern commercial aircraft that fly at transonic speeds. For the complex geometries encountered on these aircraft, creating meshes that resolve flow structures to achieve the necessary accuracy can be tedious and error prone. Pointwise's anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion method (T-Rex) is a robust and highly automated way of creating unstructured viscous meshes on complex geometries that reduces the effort required to accurately predict drag.

In this webinar, discover how to:

• Utilize 2-D T-Rex to more efficiently resolve surface curvature
• Diagonalize trailing edge surfaces for more consistent grid point distribution
• Tune T-Rex parameters to handle difficult regions, such as corners, high curvature and transitions
• Reduce time spent setting up T-Rex meshes using its top-down approach
• Convert boundary layer tetrahedra into triangular prisms