Hybrid Meshing Made Faster and More Efficient in Latest Gridgen Release

19 November 2008 – Pointwise announces the latest release of their Gridgen software featuring improved performance for the anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion technique for highly-automated, high-quality, hybrid mesh generation for computational fluid dynamics.

Anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion generates a mesh characterized by layers of high quality, high aspect ratio tetrahedra in the near-wall region for boundary layer resolution and an isotropic mesh in the farfield. By optimizing the anisotropic-isotropic blending algorithm and triangle-triangle intersections used for collision detection, the overall mesh generation time was reduced by up to a factor of 7.2. At the same time, a new algorithm for combining tetrahedra into prisms reduces a mesh’s overall cell count by up to 41% over previous releases.

“By drastically reducing the time required to extrude anisotropic tetrahedra, our customers now have a lot more flexibility in how and when they apply this highly automated technique,” said Dr. John Steinbrenner, Pointwise’s vice president for research and development. “The reduced cell count is the real payoff, because that affects the run time and memory usage for their CFD solver.”

The new release of Gridgen, Version 15.13, also improves the robustness of the anisotropic surface mesher and the isotropic tet mesher. Furthermore, the cell count reduction method represents a joint Gridgen-Pointwise solution in which the new algorithm for recovering one prism from three tetrahedra is performed in the new Pointwise meshing software using data from Gridgen’s native file.

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.

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* For a high-resolution version of the above image and a caption, please go to www.pointwise.com/pr and look for the Gridgen V15.13 press release.