“As our T-Rex technique for generating hybrid prism-tet meshes with boundary layer resolution continued to evolve, our customers collectively expressed a strong interest in using hex cells in the boundary layer instead of prisms,” said Pointwise R&D VP, Dr. John Steinbrenner.
Steinbrenner adds, “Hex cells are generally thought to provide the basis for a more accurate CFD solution, plus there will be fewer hexes than tets so computations would be faster. Fortunately, post-processing T-Rex's tet cells into hexes (12 tets per hex) was a natural extension of the existing tet-to-prism combination algorithm.”
With the T-Rex software, the quadrilateral mesh starts on the surface with pyramid and then tetrahedral meshing. The pyramid and tetrahedral are then post-processed into a hex stack. The automated software can produce a mesh compatible with your boundary layers and wake resolution.
Pointwise president John Chawner adds, “This new hex capability in T-Rex is just the first step of many that will vastly expand the scope of mesh types that Pointwise can generate … We look forward to customer feedback on this first release of unstructured hex cell generation in T-Rex to guide further developments.”
Pointwise’s hybrid meshes are compatible with ANSYS FLUENT, ANSYS CFX, ANSYS Gambit, STAR-CD, STAR-CCM+, OpenFOAM and various other formats. It can run on Linux, Mac and Windows. It also comes with scripting tools to allow for automation.
Source and image courtesy of Pointwise.