OpenFOAM CoAuthor to be Visiting Researcher at Pointwise This Autumn

2 September 2008 – Pointwise announced today Prof. Hrvoje Jasak of Wikki Ltd. and University of Zagreb, Croatia will collaborate with Pointwise this autumn as a visiting researcher. Prof. Jasak is a coauthor of OpenFOAM, a C++ library and software suite for numerical simulation in continuum mechanics. He will work with Pointwise’s development team on implementing a native interface between Pointwise’s meshing software and OpenFOAM.

“Since participating in the OpenFOAM Workshop this past summer in Milan, we have maintained an active dialog with Prof. Jasak“, said John Chawner, Pointwise’s president. “Prof. Jasak’s enthusiasm for this collaboration on the interface was a perfect fit for our visiting researcher position and will ultimately deliver a capability that our customers have been requesting.”

“Currently, a weak point of OpenFOAM in industrial use is a lack of an integrated commercial-grade CAD interaction and meshing tool,” said Prof. Jasak. He continued; “External mesh format and tedious import-export steps complicate the use and put unnecessary limitations on mesh structure. With native mesh export in Pointwise’s meshing tools, true advantage of polyhedral cell support can come to the fore. This is an exciting development for OpenFOAM, bringing closer together the communities of Pointwise and OpenFOAM users.”

Pointwise established the Visiting Researcher Program in 2007 in order to develop closer ties with academia and the research community, to leverage their expertise for the benefit of Pointwise’s customers, and to invigorate the exchange of ideas within the company.

About Pointwise: Pointwise is solving the top problem facing engineering analysts today: mesh generation for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Pointwise, Inc.’s Gridgen and Pointwise software generate structured, unstructured, and hybrid meshes; interface with CFD solvers such as FLUENT, STAR-CD, and ANSYS CFX as well as many neutral formats such as CGNS; run on Windows (Intel and AMD), Linux (Intel and AMD), Mac, and Unix; and have scripting languages that can automate CFD meshing. Large manufacturing firms and research organizations worldwide rely on Pointwise for their complete CFD preprocessing solution. More information about Gridgen and Pointwise is available on Pointwise's web site, www.pointwise.com.

About Wikki Ltd.: Wikki Ltd. supports the open source user base for numerical simulation using OpenFOAM and provides model development and commercial support for industrial clients in Europe, North America and Japan. Prof. Jasak in particular is responsible for the implementation of basic mesh handling, moving deforming mesh features and topological change support. For more information, see their web site at www.wikki.co.uk.

-End-