Harpoon - automatic extreme mesher simplifies speed grid generation

Once in a great while a technology comes along that is so revolutionary that it changes the way people think, act and work – some examples include powered flight, railroads, and the availability of the automobile. We are pleased to be a part of the newest revolutionary technology to produce high-fidelity automatic meshes – Harpoon.

Harpoon – the extreme mesher for the extreme engineer

Extreme engineering problems sometimes need extreme solutions. But the best CAE algorithms in the world won’t help you if your geometry proves too much for your mesher. Enter Harpoon, a fully automatic hex-dominant mesher specifically designed to cope with the most complex geometric entities

Key benefits

Harpoon is the ideal tool for delivering high quality meshes of even the most complex geometry. Fast and flexible, Harpoon’s powerful geometry and mesh controls are driven through a simple and logical graphical user interface (GUI). Crucially, Sharc’s experience in the mathematics of meshes ensure that the elements created will meet the needs of even the most demanding solvers.

Quality: Harpoon is a fully automatic body-fitted hex-dominant mesher. The automatic generation of volume meshes and/or surface meshes removes the need for time-consuming surface mesh generation and grid density specification.

Unlike other meshers, Harpoon does not rely on non-standard, `nasty` cut cells, but moves nodes of hexas (hexahedral elements) to maintain the grid`s hex-dominant structure and high quality cells. This results in meshes with improved solution convergence.

Flexibility:Harpoon has direct interfaces for geometry exported from many different commercial CAD packages.

Harpoon provides export facilities for meshes for most major CFD/FEA codes such as Fluent, Star-CD, CFX5, Nastran and LS-Dyna. Click here for full list of supported import and export formats [link to spec page]

Mesh refinement for specific grid regions e.g. wakes, is easily specified in the GUI should the user require more control over the mesh density.

Speed:Using state-of-the-art spatial algorithms and pseudo-integer calculations, Harpoon delivers high quality meshes at unrivalled speeds.

Turn-around times from CAD to CFD solutions can now be reduced by orders of magnitude for large complex geometry compared with other meshing tools and methods.

Simplicity:Harpoon does not require any mesh density specification to be provided. Instead, Harpoon automatically calculates the mesh density required to capture all geometric details larger than a given tolerance.

With a combination of the automatic feature extraction and an intuitive GUI, the user can generate volume and/or surface meshes in just three mouse clicks.

Robustness:Harpoon automatically checks the generated mesh for inconsistencies and proceeds to repair any cells of undesirable quality. This routine requires no input from the user and is integral to the whole meshing process.