The Meshy Award competition was instituted by Pointwise this year to recognize the artistry and technical skill of Pointwise and Gridgen users.
Dr. Böttcher’s meshes were generated in conjunction with a project involving steam generators and pumps for a power plant. The model represents the pressure vessel (RPV) of a power plant including its four primary loops and components like pipes, steam generators and pumps. The internals of the pressure vessel – with exception of the fuel pins – are resolved in all details, while the components of the primary loops (steam generators and pumps) are treated as porous media models in terms of volumetric sources and sinks. The overall hybrid mesh contains about 35,000,000 cells with scale resolutions of 150 mm inside the steam generators down to 1 mm spacing inside the RPV.
Mesh of a reactor pressure vessel. The entire mesh was approximately 35M points. larger view
Dr. Böttcher has been working in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) since 2001, including projects such as modeling of chemical reactors, nuclear pressurized water reactors, liquid metal flows (lead-cooled systems) and multiphase flow phenomena (boiling water reactors). He previously did stratospheric ozone research at the Institute of Meteorology at Free University of Berlin and was a scientific assistant at Hermann-Föttinger Institute at Technical University of Berlin. The topic of his doctoral thesis was “Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Shear Layers by Using a Discrete Vortex Method” and he earned his Ph.D. in 1990.
Dr. Michael Böttcher (left) was named winner of the Meshy Award for 2011 at the Pointwise User Group Meeting in Fort Worth. Dr. John Steinbrenner (right), vice president of research and development for Pointwise, made the presentation.
Pointwise, Inc. is solving the top problem facing engineering analysts today – mesh generation for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The company’s Gridgen and Pointwise software generates structured, unstructured and hybrid meshes; interfaces with CFD solvers, such as ANSYS FLUENT, STAR-CCM+, ANSYS CFX and OpenFOAM as well as many neutral formats, such as CGNS; runs on Windows (Intel and AMD), Linux (Intel and AMD), Mac and Unix, and has scripting languages that can automate CFD meshing. Large manufacturing firms and research organizations worldwide rely on Pointwise as their complete CFD preprocessing solution.
More information about Gridgen and Pointwise is available at www.pointwise.com.
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