5 Small Features for Easy Meshing in Fidelity Pointwise

The big, powerful features such as unstructured quadrilateral surface meshing, unstructured hexahedral layer extrusion in the anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion (T-Rex) technique, and tetrahedral mesh clustering sources often overshadow the small yet formidable features in Fidelity Pointwise. The top five small features for easy meshing in Fidelity Pointwise are listed below:

Rapidly Create Shapes

To quickly create a hemisphere, box, or simple shape, use the Draw Shapes command in the Create menu. This command is typically used to define the shape of a tetrahedral mesh clustering region for a Source. A Shape can also be used as a database entity, such as the flow field’s outer boundary.

Here, polygons, boxes, cylinders, and spheres are available as the shape primitives. They can be simply created by clicking a few control point locations and then dragging handles (the green arrows) for the relevant size controls, as shown in Figure 1. There are options for creating full, half, and quarter shapes and leaving the top, bottom, and sides open or closed.

Figure 1. Creating a database solid model that is an open-ended cone with a spherical cap is much easier in Fidelity Pointwise with Draw Shapes.

More Mesh Insight

The metric functions available in the Examine command give further insight into the status and quality of the mesh. Rather than having a color for the mesh cells based on the value of a computed metric function, you can now color them by the cell type: hexahedron, tetrahedron, prism, or pyramid. This lets the user see (in Figure 3) how well the T-Rex mesh has resolved in the boundary layer region.

Figure 2. This cut-through of a hybrid mesh for the Aachen Turbine has been colored by cell type (red=tetrahedra, yellow=pyramids, green=prisms, and blue=hexahedra).

The Database Associativity metric function computes the percentage of surface points that are constrained and unconstrained to the geometry model. In addition to tabulating a simple on/off tally, you can also visualize associativity for each individual database entity referenced by the mesh, as illustrated in Figure 3.

 Figure 3. Surface mesh points can be easily visualized and tabulated with the enhanced Database Associativity metric function.

Maintain Cell Count Budget

Verifying that your mesh fits within your cell count budget is much easier with the Cell Count command in the Grid menu. Every mesh cell, from connectors to domains and blocks, is tallied. The command also allows you to select specific entities for comparison to the overall grid, where one selected domain is compared to the entire grid.

Figure 4. The Cell Count command computes cell type totals for your selected entities versus the entire grid.

Manipulate Mesh Topology

Fidelity Pointwise's mesh topology supports surface and volume grids with a mix of cell types (for example, a domain containing both quadrilaterals and triangles), thereby enhancing the ability to manipulate the mesh's topology. Structured and unstructured grid entities can be joined into a mixed cell entity (Figure 5), and unstructured blocks can be joined.

Figure 5. Mesh entity joining has been extended so that structured and unstructured meshes can be joined. For example, the orange domain in the front consists of an unstructured and structured domain that were joined.

If you would like to generate mesh for your CFD applications using Fidelity Pointwise, request a demo today!