CD-adapco News Room - Surface wrapping capability drastically reduces meshing time for CFD analyses

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	Surface wrapping capability drastically reduces meshing time for CFD analyses CD-adapco, leading provider of advanced computationally-based engineering solutions, announces a unique capability for surface wrapping in its CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software STAR-CD. When preparing a model for a CFD analysis, surfaces need to be closed in order to generate mesh. The process of surface wrapping therefore typically involves taking raw CAD data, closing holes in geometry, joining disconnected surfaces, removing interior and overlapping surfaces. The surface wrapping capability in pro-STAR, the pre- and post-processing package for STAR-CD, automatically ‘shrink-wraps’ a closed surface mesh made of triangles and/or quadrangles onto the geometry. The engineer simply takes the model, which can be an assembly of various sources such as native CAD (CATIA V4, CATIA V5, Unigraphics, Pro/ENGINEER), IGES, STEP AP203 ISO Standard, Parasolid, STL (Stereolythography), VDA-FS and NASTRAN formats and then shrink-wraps the surface. The main benefit of this feature is that it drastically reduces turn-around-time spent on surface preparation. The bottleneck experienced in surface preparation and weeks spent in closing surfaces, can now be reduced to minutes. This is particularly important for engineers who have lots of complex CAD data and want rapid output of results. Quick, accurate answers can be calculated, enabling analyses that were not previously possible. Furthermore, it is the only surface wrapper, which is specifically designed for CFD models. Surface wrapping was originally developed for underhood modeling, and major automotive companies have benefited from huge time saving when using it to optimize the thermal management design of their vehicles. It can however be applied to any situation in which complex multi-component geometries are involved. Applications are extremely diverse including, for example: modeling flow through arteries, the design of turbines, external aerodynamics of cars, trains and aircraft, and the design of passenger compartment climate control systems. Major automotive companies such as DaimlerChrysler are already benefitting from huge time saving in the design of vehicle underhood, external, aerodynamics and passenger compartments. “STAR-CD’s surface wrapping feature is the most automatic approach that exists. It has saved us weeks of clean-up when carrying out our air flow studies and provides us with significant time and cost savings”, says Walter Bauer, DaimlerChrysler.