Grid Generation and Manipulation Tools

Grid generation today is still much more of an art than a science. Many different approaches exist and are being used, creative craftsmen are needed to operate the various packages. While a lot of effort is being spent these days to automate the various approaches such that grid generation should become as much a 'click&go' procedure as solving on these grids is about to become, no single grid generation technology seems sufficiently powerful today that it could tackle all the problems that arise.

The development of the software environment that is presented here is guided by the following ideas:

• unstructured grids offer the flexibility needed to grid complex geometries
• triangular/tetrahedral grids are simple to generate and well suited to discretize regions with isotropic flow behaviour,
• quadrilateral/hexahedral grids are needed in highly sheared regions and help to reduce the number of cells per node in areas of regular point distributions
• the key to efficient CFD is adaptive gridding

A chain of mesh pre-processing tools has been set up to accomplish this:

• a 2-D line discretization tool ipol to discretize arbitrary geometries,
• a 2-D Delaunay mesh generator delaundo that produces high quality triangular grids,
• commercial mesh generation packages such as ICEM-CFD, CFD-GEOM,
• a 2/3-D manipulation tool hip that allows format conversion, cutting grids apart, glueing various pieces together, grid validation and grid adaptation.

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