CFD code developers are adopting higher-order finite-element CFD methods due to their potential to reduce computation cost while maintaining accuracy. These techniques have been an area of research for many years and are becoming more widely available in popular CFD codes. Use this link to sign up for the discussion at 7:30 PM on Wednesday, 25th August 2021.

This paper is too dated for the techniques to be considered new any more, but it is definitely still the case that “hexahedral mesh generation continues to be demanded by many sectors of the modeling and simulation community.”

There’s no shortage of impressive looking examples but the unfortunate truth is that we still have no theoretical guarantee. Pointwise, of course, take a different approach altogether, as outlined earlier.

“Every contemporary CAD system“, says this article, “uses tolerant edges“. The explanation is worth reviewing, if only to understand why finite precision is essential in NURBS based modeling. It’s a shame that not many CAD user-interfaces make these tolerances explicit to the user, since they can lead to all manner of errors.

The article explains why TransMagic’s repair functions can do exactly what they’re intended to – and still leave the part with tolerant edges. This 17-page article from 1991 is a useful reference if you want to dig deeper, while this is pretty good too.