New Hex Layer (in green) on NASA’s CRM hybrid CFD mesh.
Recently, Pointwise announced that the generation of hexahedral cell layers has been enhanced in the latest release of their CFD meshing software.
One of the meshing software tools to receive the enhancement is T-Rex, a hybrid anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion meshing technique. Namely, T-Rex gained the ability to generate a Hex lager near walls and near wakes.
Dr. John Steinbrenner, Pointwise's VP of R&D explains, “The enhancement involves how the software combines high aspect ratio – anisotropic – tetrahedra into hexahedra … The new tet-to-hex agglomeration yields about a one-third reduction in run time, an increase of nearly 20 percent in high quality cells in the extruded layers, and almost a 30 percent reduction in the number of isotropic cells in the farfield.”
After T-Rex extrudes tetrahedral stacks from a surface mesh, post-processing techniques will combine some of these stacks into hexahedra and prisms. This will of course reduce cell count and in turn calculation time. Furthermore, many CFD solvers will be able to calculate the simulation more accurately with these prisms and hexahedra at the wakes and boundary layers.
Some CFD solvers Pointwise’s meshes are compatible with include:
- ANSYS Fluent
- ANSYS CFX
- OpenFOAM
- STAR-CCM+
Other improvements listed in this release include Edge and LAURA CFD code interfaces, and native CAD interfaces.
Source Pointwise