Quad-Dominant Surface Meshes for Mid-Fidelity Aerospace Analysis

Mid-fidelity computational methods are advancing to the point that they are becoming suitable for driving the conceptual (and preliminary) design of aerospace vehicles. When used appropriately, these mid-fidelity methods can be a valuable tools for tightly coupling physics-based models of the various disciplines --- aero-thermodynamics, structures, propulsion, and controls --- early in the design process. One of the difficulties for arbitrary configurations is the generation of a computational mesh that is more-or-less aligned with the expected physics and is relatively coarse so that the resulting computations can be performed in less than a minute. Described herein is a method for generating 3D surface meshes that are primarily flow-aligned quadrilaterals, with grid-lines clustered where needed. The mesh construction can be best understood as generated in two phases. In the first, a quadrilateral mesh is generated independently for each component, such as the wing, fuselage, wake, etc. In general these surface meshes can be highly tailored depending on the component type. In the second phase, these meshes are "stitched together" in the vicinity of the component-component intersections, leaving a small layer of triangles. This whole process is executed within the Engineering Sketch Pad.