High-fidelity CFD simulations demand accurate, solver-ready meshes that precisely represent complex geometries. Industrial CAD models, however, often contain gaps, overlaps or inconsistent surfaces, making mesh generation both time-consuming and error-prone.
Ennova CFD provides a comprehensive solution for geometry preparation, high-quality mesh generation and seamless Open FOAM integration, enabling engineers to achieve reliable results more efficiently.
Robust Geometry Preparation
Ennova operates directly on native NURBs geometry, preserving exact surface definitions rather than relying on approximations. This approach ensures simulations maintain the geometric integrity required for high-accuracy results.
Key features include
- Parallel Geometry Processing: Ennova’s proprietary algorithm enables geometry import, repair and volume extraction to execute in parallel, significantly reducing processing time and improving overall workflow efficiency. This parallelized approach ensures smoother handling of complex assemblies and faster preparation of simulation-ready models.
- Topology-Based Assessment: Edge colors provide immediate visual feedback on geometry integrity:
- Red edges: Single-connected boundaries requiring repair
- Black edges: Double-connected, watertight boundaries ready for meshing
- Yellow edges: Shared boundaries for multi-volume configurations
This targeted methodology focuses engineering effort on resolving critical geometry issues, substantially reducing the time typically spent on manual preparation.
Advanced Mesh Generation
Ennova’s meshing approach produces high-quality, solver-ready meshes with minimal manual intervention.
- Hybrid Mesh Strategy: Combines structured, unstructured and prismatic layers to achieve optimal element distribution.
- Boundary Layer Meshing: High-aspect-ratio prismatic elements are generated using an advancing-front technique, ensuring precise control over Y⁺, layer count and growth rates.
- CAD-Aligned Structured Meshes: Utilizes underlying CAD parameterization to generate aligned structured meshes in regions of principal curvature, such as airfoils or turbine blades.
- Adaptive Mesh Sizing: Mesh resolution is automatically adjusted based on curvature, flow requirements, and aspect ratio constraints.
- Automated Shrink-Wrap Meshing: For surfaces that cannot be fully repaired, an octree-based approach generates a closed surface suitable for volume extraction.
This methodology ensures accurate resolution of flow features while minimizing manual preprocessing effort.
High-Performance Deployment Architecture
Ennova is built on a scalable client-server framework designed to support industrial-grade CFD workflows with high computational demands. The server component can be deployed on HPC clusters or cloud platforms, enabling efficient processing of large, complex geometry and meshing operations. The desktop client provides an interactive environment for visualization, configuration and workflow control, ensuring a smooth user experience even when handling massive datasets. By leveraging multi-core processors and distributed computing resources, Ennova significantly accelerates geometry preparation and mesh generation. In addition, it produces fully compatible Open FOAM mesh files with accurately defined boundary regions, ensuring seamless integration into downstream simulation pipelines without additional conversion or manual adjustment.
Automation and Workflow Optimization
Ennova enables end-to-end workflow automation through its built-in JavaScript interface, allowing engineers to streamline repetitive preprocessing tasks with precision and consistency. Geometry repair, surface and volume mesh generation and data export can all be executed programmatically, eliminating manual intervention and ensuring uniform quality across all models.
This automation framework integrates seamlessly with parametric design studies and optimization pipelines, enabling the rapid creation of multiple mesh variants for sensitivity evaluations or design-of-experiments (DoE) investigations. By standardizing procedures and reducing user-dependent variability, Ennova significantly accelerates preprocessing workflows while maintaining strict control over mesh fidelity and reproducibility.
Applications Across Engineering Domains
Ennova CFD is engineered to support demanding computational studies across multiple industries where geometric precision, robust boundary-layer treatment and numerically stable meshes are crucial for reliable simulation outcomes.
- Aerospace and Turbomachinery: Aerospace configurations and turbomachinery components often involve intricate surface curvatures, tightly confined flow passages, periodic sectors and rotating interfaces. Ennova’s geometry-conformal meshing framework enables accurate representation of blade profiles, end-wall contours, tip-clearance regions and secondary-flow structures. This level of geometric and mesh integrity is essential for resolving shock interactions, transition zones, vortex systems, thermal loading and pressure-driven instabilities that govern aerodynamic efficiency and structural durability.
- Automotive Aerodynamics: Ground vehicles require detailed capture of external and internal airflow phenomena, including wake behavior, transient vortex shedding and cooling-air routing. Ennova’s ability to maintain smooth surface discretization and consistent boundary-layer resolution allows engineers to analyze drag-producing features, underbody flow acceleration, wheel-body interactions, and thermal management pathways. The resulting meshes support predictive assessments aligned with wind-tunnel observations and transient driving conditions.
- Industrial Equipment and Heat-Transfer Systems: Systems such as heat exchangers, process equipment and thermal-fluid machinery often contain compact geometries with thin walls, fin assemblies, narrow channels and multi-region conduction-convection coupling. Ennova’s meshing algorithms preserve surface continuity and element quality in these constrained spaces, enabling stable computations of flow maldistribution, pressure drop, recirculation zones, thermal gradients and phase-dependent transport behavior. This assists in evaluating performance margins, identifying inefficiencies and guiding iterative design improvements.
Across these application areas, Ennova reduces the dependence on manual preprocessing by delivering meshes that are consistent, solver-ready and aligned with engineering requirements. The resulting workflow accelerates simulation throughput, enhances numerical robustness and provides engineers with a dependable foundation for advanced CFD analysis and design exploration.
Conclusion
Ennova CFD fundamentally enhances the meshing workflow for Open FOAM users by providing precise geometry preparation alongside adaptive, high-quality mesh generation within a scalable and integrated environment. It enables engineers to produce accurate, solver-ready meshes for industrial-scale CFD applications, significantly reducing project timelines while improving simulation fidelity. By leveraging advanced algorithms and intelligent automation, Ennova CFD allows users to achieve greater precision, operational efficiency and consistently reliable results even for the most complex and demanding simulations.