Unstructured Quad & Hex Meshing Using Pointwise

There are several real advantages to adopting a multi-block structured meshing strategy. Examples include alignment of cell faces with the flow, improvements in solution convergence and accuracy, and greater control over the distribution of grid points. However, the models that engineers and scientists are using for their simulations have trended towards incorporating more detailed features; thus, making them more realistic and complex. In doing so, the task of creating multi-block structured meshes around these complex models has become more challenging and time-consuming. Analysts like to retain many of the aforementioned benefits of multi-block structured meshes without the added overhead often associated with such meshing techniques. Pointwise, Inc. is tackling this problem with the release of new unstructured quadrilateral and hexahedral dominant meshing algorithms among a host of other productivity enhancements in V18 of its CFD (computational fluid dynamics) meshing product.

Released in September, Pointwise V18 has not been out long, but already users are leveraging these productivity enhancements to their advantage. Unstructured viscous meshes generated using our latest T-Rex (anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion) meshing algorithm have fewer cells, solutions converge more quickly and robustly, and results are more accurate. Many of these benefits come from applying simple changes to existing grids and taking advantage of the boundary-aligned quad-dominant surface meshing technique—features new in Pointwise V18.

In this webinar, we highlight four new major features available in Pointwise V18: quad-dominant surface meshing, farfield shape creation, unstructured hex-dominant boundary layer meshing, and volumetric sources. Starting with an existing aircraft geometry, we demonstrate the entire meshing process beginning with the generation of a quad-dominant surface mesh. Next, areas of high curvature are resolved, then farfield boundaries are generated using the latest shape creation utilities. The same shape creation utilities are then used to define a source that provides off-body volumetric grid refinement to help track flow features of interest. The volume mesh is generated using T-Rex, our unstructured viscous meshing algorithm, which extrudes stacks of flow-aligned hexahedra and prisms that smoothly transition to an isotropic tetrahedral farfield. Lastly, we examine the volume mesh cell quality using several of the many mesh quality metrics available to users of Pointwise.

Discover how to:

• Automatically create unstructured quad-dominant surface meshes
• Extrude flow-aligned, hex-dominant boundary layer resolved cells using T-Rex
• Easily generate shapes to define farfield boundaries and sources
• Define off-body volumetric refinement regions using sources