[rmcdo]

FYI,

In January, a NASA parametric geometry tool, OpenVSP, was released as open source software. One of the primary uses of this tool is to feed CFD, so I'd like to reach out to various open source CFD communities to let them know it exists. To check it out, start at the main web site....

http://www.openvsp.org

VSP is not CAD. VSP abandons the ability for CAD to model truly arbitrary shapes. In exchange, VSP makes great strides in ease of use, flexibility, and speed. If you've been frustrated with CAD and your ability to model a geometry for CFD analysis, check VSP out.

VSP can be used to create watertight triangulated surfaces. In fact, there are two approaches to do this. First, VSP can perform a boolean union on a simple wireframe. Second, VSP will find the Bezier surface intersection curves and will generate an isotropic mesh on those surfaces.

The first mode is only appropriate for Cartesian methods. The second should be able to feed many volume mesh generators. VSP already writes out TetGen files, support for other volume generators is under development.

OpenVSP has been used very productively to feed Cart3D, a NASA Cartesian Euler code. There are some tutorials and documentation of that process available...

http://www.openvsp.org/wiki/doku.php?id=c3dtutorial

In addition, there is a general presentation about the file types that VSP can input/output. This presentation discusses the Cart3D workflows and goes into the mesh generation process in more detail.

http://www.openvsp.org/wiki/lib/exe/...es_meshing.pdf

Although VSP is targeted at airplanes, its ease of use has led people to use it for lots of things the developers never intended. As an open source project, we welcome all kinds of input and suggestions. In the medium term (~2 year) development plan, we will extend VSP to support user-defined components. This capability will transform VSP from an aircraft-specific tool to one that would handle any application with equal ease.

Rob