An Introduction to Cartesian Grid CART3D

boling2000

Cart3D is a high-fidelity inviscid analysis package for conceptual and preliminary aerodynamic design. It allows users to perform automated CFD analysis on complex geometry. The package includes utilities for geometry import, surface modeling and intersection, mesh generation and flow simulation. Currently the package includes two flow simulation codes, Tiger, and flowCart. The package is highly automated so that geometry acquisition, and mesh generation can usually be performed within a matter of minutes on most modern UNIX workstations or PC's.  
Geometry comes into the package in the form of surface triangulations which can be generated from many popular CAD packages, from legacy surface triangulations or from structured surface grids. Cart3D uses adaptively refined Cartesian grids to discretize the space surrounding a geometry and  cuts the geometry out of the set of "cut-cells" which actually intersect the boundary. The flow solvers run on uni- and multi-processor computing platforms.