How to Generate a Quarter Million CFD Meshes Without Trying

Let's face it. Generating meshes for CFD is a necessary evil. Meshing is a means to an end and yet is said to require 75% of an engineer's time. NASA's CFD Vision 2030 Study called most CFD processes "onerous" and cited meshing's inability to generate a suitable mesh for a complex geometry on the first attempt as a major contributing factor to the problem.

So what is a CFD engineer to do?

If you're Dr. Amine Ben Haj Ali at Bombardier, a leading supplier of several classes of business jets and other mobility solutions, you partner with a CFD meshing software provider that offers the capabilities you require. In particular, you look for software that generates meshes of sufficiently high quality to ensure converged and accurate CFD solutions, provides flexibility in terms of mesh types, and includes an API that provides procedural access to all the meshing functionality. Dr. Ben Haj Ali found all those attributes and more in the Cadence Pointwise Meshing software.

So how do you generate 250,000 meshes?

You use Pointwise's Glyph scripting API to encapsulate your best practices in an automatic meshing tool called MARS—Meshing and Adaptive Remeshing Server. MARS is used daily at Bombardier to produce high-quality meshes on complex geometries. Since 2017, it's said that MARS has been used to generate over 250,000 meshes.

So you generate a quarter million meshes by letting an automated system do it for you. Watch this video to learn how it's done.

If you'd like to not generate a quarter million meshes (or more) manually and would prefer to try a software platform that brings all the attributes you need to automate the process, request a free trial license of Cadence Pointwise Meshing today.