CFD meshing software price is an important factor when deciding on purchasing the software. In this article, I will try to explain how it is formed, what exactly you pay, and why is meshing worth your money.
All of us working on the CFD meshing software have heard the question from the title more than once. Usually, more questions are to follow: „Are you still messing around with that meshing thing? Isn’t it history yet? What exactly do I pay? Why is meshing not free?
Last but not least is the question “Is meshing worth your money? Although for this last one, in my (biased) opinion, the answer is definitely a big and simple YES, the answers to other questions take some time to explain.
1. Are you still messing around with that meshing thing? I do not see the point of focusing on meshing.
Without the good-quality mesh, it is not possible to complete a simulation and it cannot be accurate. Meshing is the most labour-intensive and time-consuming part of a simulation process and a good mesher can make this process far less time-consuming and stress-free. Stress causes our muscles to tighten and reduce blood flow in capillaries, resulting in fatigue, headaches, baldness, etc. Why would you do that to yourself on purpose?
2. What exactly do I pay for?
Engineering problems that a good mesh solves are the following:
- BOUNDARY LAYERS – a good mesher generates high-quality boundary layers in complex domains with almost 100% layer coverage. All solvers like this and this is necessary to get accurate shear stress at the walls.
- MULTI-DOMAIN MESHING – is important when analysing the interaction between various parts. It is crucial for rotating machinery, CHT, and other problems where the interface needs to be tracked. Generating conformal mesh interfaces between various domains, including high-quality boundary layers, is not an easy task taking a lot of time to develop and test until it becomes a product running smoothly and reliably.
- MESH REFINEMENT REGIONS – assigning refinement regions shall be easy-to-use and flexible such that the user can use the mesher in batch mode later on. In addition, it shall be easy to visualize on a screen such that users can easily spot mistakes in their setup.
- AUTOMATIC CELL SIZING – saves your time in case of complex geometries where it gets very time-consuming to manually specify the required mesh resolution everywhere in the mesh. Automatic criteria refine the mesh locally where it is needed to generate a good mesh everywhere inside the domain.
- POSSIBILITY TO STOP AFTER EACH STEP OF THE WORKFLOW – this seems unnecessary, and yet it is one of the most time-saving options when meshing complex geometries for the first time. Stopping after an initial stage of the meshing process lets the user check if the mesh is fine enough in critical regions. This step requires only a fraction of the total time, and it is immediately clear whether the resulting mesh will be fine enough in the critical regions.
3. Isn’t it history yet?
While it may seem outdated, the most important meshing problems have not been solved yet.
There are plenty of interesting problems that need to be solved here.
Some of them are:
- Generation of geometry-aligned all-hexahedra meshes – this is the holy grail of meshing and it will take some time before it becomes a reality. Meshes consisting of hexahedra have a complex structure that cannot be altered locally, making the process of generating mesh topology very complex. Block-structured meshers generate high-quality meshes, and they require a highly-skilled analyst to reap the benefits at the expense of long setup times.
- Boundary layers – are a complex topic because the prismatic cells in the boundary layer have to be orthogonal and highly anisotropic. This requires the development of algorithms for quality control and improvement that are reliable for anisotropic cells in complex geometries. In addition, high-quality surface preparation methods are needed to achieve a smooth transition of face normal from one boundary face to another in order to be able to generate high-quality boundary layers.
- Parallel meshing algorithms – most modern machines have many cores and being able to utilise them efficiently requires a great deal of expertise and code optimisation. In addition, combining work-distributes and domain-distributed approaches is needed to be able to generate meshes consisting of billions of elements in companies having moderate hardware resources. Utilising the GPU effectively also offers potential benefits for floating-point intensive calculations such as smoothers.
All of them are already on our development roadmap. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with all of our latest developments.
Why robust and high-quality meshing is not free?
When starting our company, we launched the open source mesher cfMesh. The community accepted it very well, however, the contributions and the lack of financial support did not follow the excitement, therefore we could not work on complex topics (boundary layers, multi-material meshing, etc.) relevant to all of our users. Back in 2017, we decided to make a total transition from open source, and today CF-MESH+ is a closed-source commercial product that only saves the mesh in the OF format since our users still ask it a lot.
We understand all the budgeting issues academia and freelancers face. Being aware of this, we offer some discounts, paying in installments for some licensing options, as well as hourly-based licenses where you pay only what you use.
It is important to point out that software development requires highly educated and skilled people, who are hard to find and require a decent salary. Therefore the price of the software is, by some standards, high. The license also grants you a certain amount of support hours, which also brings significant value and cannot be given with the free software. With open source, when you have the problem, you are on your own and if you are on a tight budget or with a short deadline, this may be the detrimental to the success of your project.
Our customers, many of them in the academia, often point out how CF-MESH+ offers the best value for money, especially compared to other options.
How to simplify your meshing
Our answer to the meshing problem is CF-MESH+, with its main features:
- efficient,
- easy-to-use,
- An automated meshing process
- able to resolve complex domains faced in industrial settings
If you are curious about whether this works with your cases, try it out yourself.
