Multi-zone computations are fairly common in many CFD applications, as a quick web-search will reveal. However, setting up data for these models is not always straightforward. This 30 minute “certified equation free” presentation covers useful ground: config files, mesh files, results, and nomenclature including the interesting term “midprocessing“.

Iso-surfaces are extremely useful but since an iso-surface can be “open”, there are times when it can’t be used to “carve” out regions of your model that you’re interested in. The recent release of Tecplot provides an excellent way to combine value blanking with zone extraction. See this video for a quick introduction on how to use this feature.

Auto-save is usually a good thing, but there’s often a significant difference between idea and implementation. Pointwise models can be quite large, which means writing the file to disk can take more time than is acceptable for interactive use. Transcript files are an elegant solution: they provide the means to recover from an unexpected exit, without the overhead of frequent disk I/O. See this video on how to turn them on for your Pointwise sessions.