HeldenSurface: A CAD Tool to Generate High-Quality Surfaces

One of the primary shortcomings identified during the NASA sponsored CFD Vision 2030 Study conducted during 2012-2014 was that the generation of meshes suitable for CFD simulations constitutes a principal bottleneck in the workflow process as it requires significant human intervention. Our solution to this problem is the development of HeldenSurface, which is a robust tool for automatially converting arbitrary starting geometry definitions into a collection of watertight CAD surfaces. These CAD surfaces are then used as the starting point for existing commercial grid generators such as our HeldenMesh unstructured grid generator. This represents a critical capability needed to automate the CFD mesh generation process – permitting the thousands of engineers performing CFD to focus their efforts on interpreting results instead of generating meshes. The feasibility of HeldenSurface was proven during our Phase I effort through its successful demonstration on multiple test cases. Our Phase II effort builds upon this past success by focusing on its further development and demonstration, testing, and completion of commercialization assessments. We offer a proven path to commercialization of HeldenSurface by leveraging our current success with the commercialization of our HeldenMesh grid generation software and we anticipate offering HeldenSurface as a commercial product within 2 years of completion of the Phase II effort.