The lack of integrity in CAD data is one impediment to the effective use of CFD for solving engineering problems of interest to the Navy. One example of a simulation impeded by poor CAD data involves aircraft operating in and around a ship's airwake. These CFD simulations are hindered by the fact that CAD data for the ship and/or aircraft when delivered to the engineer is not suitable for CFD meshing due to two main problems. The first problem involves geometric surfaces that don't properly fit together and instead contain gaps and overlaps (more specifically, they "leak"). The second problem involves excessive detail, both in the number of entities used to define the geometry (for example, using thousands of surfaces to define the hull) and in the level of geometric detail included in the CAD file.

Dr. John Steinbrenner, Pointwise's Vice President of Ressearch and Development and Principal Investigator for this contracted research, foresees the long term benefits of this project. "Problems with CAD geometry are the biggest problem with applied CFD today. Creating watertight surface geometry in software will free the engineer to focus on the simulation results and fluid dynamics phenomena."