How Meshing Stole an Hour of My Life

This is a follow on to post I wrote a little more than 8 years ago when I was employed by Pointwise. At the time, I talked about the improvements in the meshing experience using Gridgen for my PhD relative to using Pointwise in industry. TL;DR Gridgen = many days. Pointwise V17 = an hour.

So, what has changed in that to warrant a follow on? Flashpoint is what has changed. Flashpoint is Pointwise’s name for its new automatic meshing capability. And yes, I am using the word “automatic” with Pointwise because it truly is automatic. The best part is the automation has not come at the expense of Pointwise’s bottom-up capabilities that it has always been known for. If you don’t quite like Flashpoint’s results, you can jump in and make changes where needed. It’s kind of like the Pareto principal: the first 20% of the work yields 80% of the results. Except in Flashpoint’s case, I would say it’s closer to 5% of the work for 95% of the result.

Would it impress you to know that it now takes about 5 minutes to make the equivalent mesh from the original article? It impressed me and I generally believe improvements in CFD are more often than not incremental – at best. Equivalent is probably not even a fair comparison. The new mesh is better. Check out the images comparing the meshes from Gridgen, previously with Pointwise V17, and with Flashpoint in Pointwise V18.4.

Unstructured quads and hexes. Check. Automatic curvature and resolution detection. Check. Surface and volumetric resolution sources. Check. Automatic boundary layer generation with collision detection and quality controls. Check. High quality meshing with few compromises doesn’t get any easier.

So, what is my point now? There’s no excuse to be discouraged by meshing. It has even gotten easier with Pointwise. Reach out to us to learn more about how Pointwise can help you.

Note: In the original article the mesh took about 45 minutes but saying an hour looked nicer in the title – close enough.