News Release

An insight into new and upcoming developments by Dr Simon Harvey, Chief Software Architect

These are exciting times at Cambridge Flow Solutions (CFS). After six years in development, and shaped by our commercial clients' demanding requirements, Boxer is about to be brought to a wider audience.

The core technology of our system, the octree-based parallel mesh engine, continues to excel on ever larger and more complex problems reliably delivering usable meshes. Our scalable architecture was designed from the ground up and exploits octree’s fractal-like behaviour. This results in no problem becoming too big and gives Boxer the scalable characteristic that the quality of the generated mesh is independent of the complexity of the incoming geometry.

Now with the foundation grid generation methodology near maturity, CFS's recent development focus has turned to adding new features to our graphical user interface (GUI) for Boxer. These are designed to guide the engineer through the mesh generation process whilst providing maximum feedback in the shortest possible time.

Traditional CAD repair and pre-processing are a major bottleneck in the CFD prediction cycle. Boxer's robust mesh generator frees the engineer from spending hours performing CAD repair operations; thus the Boxer GUI is optimised toward enabling the engineer to rapidly specify meshing boundary conditions and inspecting the resultant mesh.

As Boxer uses an octree as the backbone of its process, this allows the engineer to quickly generate and visualize an approximation of the final mesh length scales and spatial distribution before the final body-fitted conformal mesh generation step.

From visualizations of the input geometry and rapid octree prototype to the final, polished, hybrid conformal mesh, this interface puts the engineer in the Boxer driving seat. With the user interface running as lightweight process separate from the parallel mesh engine, this allows even a low end laptop to present the graphical interface whilst driving a large cluster hosting the meshing engine.

In the coming months CFS will be updating our website and providing more exciting news of developments in our flagship product, Boxer.

Please contact Mary Aldridge for further information.