Hex-Tet Meshing with Pointwise’s T-Rex Technique

Pointwise showcases a hexahedral cell meshing technique.

This week, Pointwise announced their new CFD hybrid meshing software, T-Rex. The expanded software will now be able to create hexahedral cell layers near the walls of your designs.

“As our T-Rex technique for generating hybrid prism-tet meshes with boundary layer resolution continued to evolve, our customers collectively expressed a strong interest in using hex cells in the boundary layer instead of prisms,” said Pointwise R&D VP, Dr. John Steinbrenner.

Steinbrenner adds, “Hex cells are generally thought to provide the basis for a more accurate CFD solution, plus there will be fewer hexes than tets so computations would be faster. Fortunately, post-processing T-Rex’s tet cells into hexes (12 tets per hex) was a natural extension of the existing tet-to-prism combination algorithm.”

With the T-Rex software, the quadrilateral mesh starts on the surface with pyramid and then tetrahedral meshing. The pyramid and tetrahedral are then post-processed into a hex stack. The automated software can produce a mesh compatible with your boundary layers and wake resolution.

Pointwise president John Chawner adds, “This new hex capability in T-Rex is just the first step of many that will vastly expand the scope of mesh types that Pointwise can generate … We look forward to customer feedback on this first release of unstructured hex cell generation in T-Rex to guide further developments.”

Pointwise’s hybrid meshes are compatible with ANSYS FLUENT, ANSYS CFX, ANSYS Gambit, STAR-CD, STAR-CCM+, OpenFOAM and various other formats. It can run on Linux, Mac and Windows. It also comes with scripting tools to allow for automation.

Source and image courtesy of Pointwise.

Written by

Shawn Wasserman

For over 10 years, Shawn Wasserman has informed, inspired and engaged the engineering community through online content. As a senior writer at WTWH media, he produces branded content to help engineers streamline their operations via new tools, technologies and software. While a senior editor at Engineering.com, Shawn wrote stories about CAE, simulation, PLM, CAD, IoT, AI and more. During his time as the blog manager at Ansys, Shawn produced content featuring stories, tips, tricks and interesting use cases for CAE technologies. Shawn holds a master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Guelph and an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.