FORT WORTH, TX (1 September 2010)—Pointwise announces the latest release of its Gridgen computational fluid dynamics (CFD) meshing software featuring an extensive suite of new tools for coupling mesh generation with overset grid assembly (OGA). Close coupling of meshing and OGA has the potential to significantly reduce the effort required to generate overset grids by making OGA visible to guide meshing and ensure the most accurate and effective grid overlaps.

“For a long time, Gridgen has been very popular within the overset grid community for its geometry handling, surface meshing, and structured hexahedral volume gridding,” said Nick Wyman, director of applied research at Pointwise.

“Expanding our tool set to include the assembly process was the logical next step in the evolution of the product. Customer input heavily influenced how this feature set was implemented.”

Overset gridding is an alternative to multi-block grids. In a multi-block grid, the three-dimensional domain is decomposed into regions (blocks), each of which is filled with a structured hexahedral grid (also called a mapped mesh). The blocks connect to each other with complete point-to-point matching. Because a multi-block topology can be time consuming to create for a complex shape like an aircraft, a time-saving alternative is an overset topology. In an overset grid, the blocks don’t abut – they overlap. The goal of OGA software, therefore, is to compute how to interpolate information from one block to the next and ensure that interpolation is accurate.

“Pointwise has been happy to sponsor the bi-annual symposium on Overset Composite Grids and Solution Technology since 1998 and we’ll be present at this year’s event to share this new development with the community,” said Wyman.

Also included in Gridgen V15.16 are improvements to the tet-to-prism cell recombination algorithm used with the T-Rex™ hybrid meshing technique that can reduce overall cell count in some cases by 28 percent and a native build for Intel-based Macs running OS X 10.4 and newer, including OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

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

Pointwise and Gridgen are registered trademarks and Pointwise Glyph, Gridgen Glyph and T-Rex are trademarks of Pointwise, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owner.

Overset Assembly Improvements in Gridgen were sponsored by Arnold Engineering Development Center, Air Force Materiel Command and the USAF.

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For more information: Jan Batts 817-377-2807 news@pointwise.com