FORT WORTH, TX (8 April 2014)—Pointwise will host a joint webinar on 29 April with Stanford University, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics entitled “Supersonic Aircraft Shape Design Powered by SU2 and Pointwise.” The webinar, at 11 a.m. CDT (GMT -5), details how Pointwise and the open-source SU2 computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver can be used to tackle supersonic aircraft design.

The webinar will be hosted by Travis Carrigan, Pointwise senior engineer; Thomas D. Economon, Trent Lukaczyk and Dr. Francisco Palacios of Stanford. Their biographies are available at www.pointwise.com/webinar.

To register, go to www.pointwise.com/webinar.

The webinar will demonstrate how to formulate and solve a shape design problem in SU2, using a continuous adjoint formulation to obtain the sensitivities for gradient-based optimization. Recent advances in simulation-based design opens doors to new supersonic aircraft designs with reduced sonic boom impacts, an important advance because current regulations do not permit supersonic flight over land due to sonic boom noise. The design of these aircraft requires accurate predictions of sonic boom on the ground and techniques for shaping the aircraft to achieve a desired boom signature while maintaining performance.

Watertight, surface and volume meshes for complex geometries can be quickly generated in Pointwise and exported to the native SU2 format. A properly constructed mesh aids in accurately predicting boom on the ground. A new script for Pointwise helps designers generate free-form deformation boxes for geometry parameterization and shape design in SU2.

The webinar will include a discussion of proper settings for the flow and adjoint problems, objectives and constraints, free form deformation design variables and mesh deformation. Optimal shape design results from SU2 for the Lockheed Martin 1021 aircraft from the 1st AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop will be presented.

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

More information about Pointwise is available at www.pointwise.com.

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

#