Pointwise, a software company specialising in grid generation and pre-processing software for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), has been awarded a two-year, $1.2 million contract from the US Air Force Materiel Command, part of the Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC), located at Arnold Air Force Base, Tennessee.
The contract was awarded for the continued development of the company’s overset grid assembly feature suite and related technologies. More specifically, this new contract, is a Commercialisation Readiness Programme (CRP) extension to Pointwise’ recently completed Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II contract. This gives Pointwise’ Applied Research team the opportunity to develop and enhance techniques ranging from overset grid inspection and remediation, to near-body viscous layer and automated off-body meshing.
The Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC) is a ground-based flight test facility operated by the US Air Force Test Center. The AEDC is one of the largest complexes of flight simulation test facilities in the world, operating 43 aerodynamic and propulsion wind tunnels, rocket and turbine engine test cells, space environmental chambers, arc heaters, ballistic ranges and other specialised units.
Nick Wyman, director of applied research, Pointwise said: ‘This award validates our previous efforts in overset grid generation and assembly and will allow us to support the US Air Force’s need for a mission-ready simulation and modelling tool. The software developed during this project will provide analysis engineers with automated tools leading to significant reduction in overset mesh generation workload.’
Pointwise software is designed to help users who need to reliably generating high-fidelity meshes – one of the main challenges facing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) today. The company’s Pointwise software generates structured, unstructured and hybrid meshes; interfaces with CFD solvers, such as Ansys Fluent, STAR-CCM+, Ansys CFX, OpenFOAM, and SU2 as well as many neutral formats, such as CGNS. The software also includes its own scripting language, Glyph, which can be used to automate CFD meshing.
