Overview
CFD Meshing and Pre-Processing
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used in today’s design processes to improve and increase the efficiency of products without relying on time-consuming and expensive physical testing. Over the last decade, tools and methods have been constantly improved to increase productivity and reduce time to results. The latest revolution came from GPU acceleration for CFD solvers, providing up to 10 times speed-up. Despite these solver performance improvements, one of the biggest challenges engineers face in their daily work remains: up to 80% of the engineering time is still spent on geometry pre-processing and meshing.
With Cadence Fidelity CFD software, engineers can overcome this bottleneck. Advanced automation and best practices cut your pre-processing and meshing time from days to hours and create high-fidelity meshes with 100% viscous layers coverage for highly accurate results.
Features
High-Speed CFD Pre-Processing
Customer Story
Honda Demonstrates Major Breakthrough in Meshing Speed with Autoseal
“Where a skilled engineer typically needed one full week to close all the holes of the cabin space before, now this whole process is brought down to just about one hour with AutoSeal.”
Akio Takamura
Chief Engineer at Honda Automotive
Key Benefits
High-Accuracy Mesh Generation
Realize your CFD potential with high-fidelity mesh generation—benefit from dedicated workflows and best practices for your specific application. Fidelity offers fully interactive or automated meshing for Volume-to-Surface (V2S) and Surface-to-Volume (S2V) mesh generation.
Fast and reliable
Strong automation and fast and robust algorithms ensure reliable and high-quality mesh generation for most complex geometries.
Mesh Optimization
Fidelity has advanced algorithms that optimize and smoothen meshes to meet CFD solver quality criteria, such as skewness, non-orthogonality, and adjacent volume ratio, among others. These optimizations are crucial for achieving optimal results using Fidelity, Fluent, OpenFOAM, and other similar solvers.
Higher Accuracy
Optimized volume and boundary layer meshes result in fewer numerical errors and high-fidelity results. Capture all relevant physics with high-quality viscous layers and constant boundary layer growth.
Faster Solver Convergence
Fidelity’s high-quality meshes lead to more robust computations and improved solver convergence— resulting in faster time to results
Applications
Wide Range of Meshing Options
Fidelity provides a wide range of meshing options: full hexahedral meshes with hanging nodes, mixed element conformal meshes, and much more. It offers two techniques for high-quality viscous layer generation to ensure 100% viscous layer insertion: the inflation or the extrusion method.
Anisotropic Meshing
- Optimized mesh for physics and geometric features (Leading, trailing edge)
- Highest accuracy with dramatic reduction of cell count thanks to anisotropic meshes
Boundary Layer
- Reliable and high-quality boundary layer meshing
- Ensure 100% viscous layer insertion for S2V and V2S methods
Hybrid Meshing
- Seamlessly combine structured and unstructured meshing in one single project
- The Fidelity Flow solver is designed to understand both mesh technologies automatically. No conversion from structured to unstructured is needed, the transition from meshes to the solver is direct, and the flow solver uses the best of the combination of structured and unstructured grids.
Mesh Export
- Support for 30+ most common CAE solvers (commercial and academic)
- One-click export to OpenFOAM
Distributed Parallel Meshing
- Leverage parallel and scalable mesh generation
- Generate high-quality meshes with 100M cells in minutes
Customer Story
Toyota Drastically Reduces Simulation Time with Automatic CFD Pre-Processing
“Fidelity enabled us to reduce our total lead time by 91% while consistently providing high-quality meshes with excellent layer coverage."
Antoine Delacroix
Toyota Motor Europe NV/SA
Industries
Application-specific meshing
Select from dedicated workflows and benefit from best practices for your specific application.
Aerospace
- High-quality surface mesh generation
- Efficiently capture flow details at the leading and trailing edge with anisotropic surface mesh
- Optimal boundary layer capturing with an S2V approach
“We picked Cadence Hexpress as mesher and preprocessor of the OpenFOAM library of solvers. It allows us to generate high-quality meshes with full boundary layer coverage in a short amount of time without needing an extensive amount of training. The meshes generated have shown excellent optimization with respect to OpenFOAM mesh quality metrics and allowed us to generate very consistent results."
Flying Whales
Automotive
- Automated workflows for large and complex geometries with V2S
- Automatically handle unclean geometries closing with AutoSeal
- Creation of boundary layers with 100% surface walls coverage
"Meshing tools cover a wide range of simulation cases. Fidelity Hexpress enables quick and hands-off mesh generation, while Fidelity Pointwise offers more manual control over surface and volume grids."
Hopium
Thermal Management
- Automatic multi-domain mesh generation for conjugate heat transfer (CHT) applications
- Conformal connections between solid/fluid interface to avoid interpolation error
- Include optimized thin wall meshing
Learn more about how Honda uses Fidelity CFD for thermal management simulation.
Marine
- Dynamic and adaptive grid refinement
- Mesh deformation or overset meshing to handle the 6DOF solver
- Anisotropic fully hexahedral mesh for free surface capturing
Workflow and Automation
Interactive Workflow and Python Automation
Fidelity provides an interactive workflow from geometry import and cleanup to sealing and high-fidelity mesh generation. With instantaneous mesh preview, users get a sneak preview of the mesh before even starting the grid generation process.
Fidelity’s Python API provides access to all features available in the Fidelity GUI. Automate your CAD cleanup and meshing or your entire CFD workflow with Fidelity Python scripting for headless operation.
Learn how to boost your productivity with Python programming and scripting for Fidelity CFD.
Resources
Expand Your Arsenal of CFD Resources Here
Industry Trends
Keep yourself knowledgeable about the latest and greatest industry conferences and product developments.
Customer Stories
Learn more about how our customers are using our CFD solutions to better their innovation.
View Customer StoriesBlogs, White Papers, Webinars
Find a host of talks, papers, and researched developed by Cadence for your solutions.
View All Blogs, Webinars and White PapersTraining and Support
Need Help?
Training
The Training Learning Maps help you get a comprehensive visual overview of learning opportunities.
Training News - Subscribe
Online Support
The Cadence Online Support (COS) system fields our entire library of accessible materials for self-study and step-by-step instruction.
Request Support
Technical Forums
Find community on the technical forums to discuss and elaborate on your design ideas.
Find Answers in cadence technical forums
