TrueGrid® Customer's Comments

TrueGrid^® Customer's Comments

The following testimonials have been gathered over the years from various sources. Some were posted on newsgroups and some are taken from comments the customer made either verbally or in e-mail. All are used with permission and appreciation. Not all customers are still affiliated with the organizations cited below, though they were at the time they made the statement(s).

"Our group has used TrueGrid every day for the past 10 years. We have used it to mesh everything from a full scale structural model of the 747 TWA Flt 800 accident to complex aircraft fittings on the F-22. After a little use, the projection method in TrueGrid becomes so intuitive that you won't want to use anything else. TrueGrid's ongoing capability to support the LSTC and LLNL codes and its effectiveness in reading geometry from a wide range of drafting software ensures our use of the product for years to come."

Lee Firth
Process and Event Simulation
Boeing Phantom Works
Seattle Wa

"IMHO, modeling complex curved geometries with hexahedral elements is an extremely difficult problem. It can be done, but requires a lot of manual manipulation. I have done it by generating meshes manually. However these meshes are not fully parametric, which is a big drawback because it makes them difficult to modify (or "remesh"). I recommend the program TrueGrid . . . It is relatively inexpensive, and employs an interesting and powerful technique for generating parametric hex meshes. They use a "seed and warp" approach that theoretically can handle any geometry. It takes a while to figure out, but once you have it... it's really great. good luck,"

Todd C. Doehring, Ph.D.
Heart Valve Laboratory
Lerner Research Institute
Cleveland Clinic Foundation

"I am very impressed with TrueGrid's capabilities for generating high quality meshes especially 3-D solid meshes. TG is a great preprocessor. Once people learn it, they can generate a mesh in a fraction of the time they would using any other preprocessor. The great thing about it is the parametric aspect. You can change the mesh density or transition in a few seconds once you have built the initial mesh."

Ala (Al) Tabiei, Director
Center of Excellence in DYNA3D Analysis
Department of Aerospace Enginering and Mechanics
The University of Cincinnati

"As a longtime user of TrueGrid, and its predecessor INGRID since about 1983, I cannot comment on the merits of TrueGrid relative to other mesh generators, but I can say why I have never bothered to look for another preprocessor: support and capabilities.

My typical TrueGrid support questions are of the type "How can I do so-and-so with TrueGrid?" to which the response is typically a list of solution options ranging from the obvious to the elegant. But my most memorable "support moments" have been after spending a few hours wrestling with a particularly stubborn modeling problem, probably stubborn modeler is more accurate, and finally giving up the quest for a self-solution with a call to XYZ Software for help. Most often this call has occurred after business hours, and what a comforting surprise it is to have the phone answered not by a voicemail menu system, but rather a principal of the company who quickly grasps the nature of the modeling problem and dispenses appropriate solution options, that work.

For me the most powerful TrueGrid capabilities are its extensive model parameterization ability combined with its FORTRAN expression processing. These capabilities make it quite easy to develop a model in a modular fashion and then easily combine modules to create variants on a baseline model. The use of FORTRAN like "If-Then-Else" constructs allows quite different models to be constructed by simply changing an appropriate flagged model parameter. This greatly minimizes the chances for user errors when generating similar models for parameter studies. Perhaps less obvious, extensive use of model parameterization, combined with suitable embedded comments, can yield a self-documenting model, which is of great value months later when reviewing models or reusing modular components."

Len Schwer, independent consultant since 1994 (www.schwer.net)
DYNA3D and LS-DYNA user since 1983
LSTC Geomaterial Modeling Short Course Instructor (www.lstc.com/pages/classes)
Director, Geomaterial Modeling for FEA Information (www.geomaterialmodeling.com)

"If you are attempting to use all hexahedral elements, I would not use ABAQUS (as your preprocessor, ed.) but would switch to something like TrueGrid, www.truegrid.com They specialize in generating 100% hex meshes and we have had great success in using it as the pre-processor to ABAQUS."

Eric S. Bono, Process Analysis Engineer
Concurrent Technologies Corp.

"I would suggest you go to another type of meshing program and just use Abaqus to run your simulations. I have used TrueGrid (www.truegrid.com) many times to model the 3D geometry of bones, and I know others have used it for modeling the heart (see examples on their web site)."

Jonathan Pearlman
Cornell University

"The major finite element meshing programs (PATRAN, HYPERMESH, FEMAP, etc) all support automatic surface meshing if you have the CAD surface of the bone. There are commercial surface reconstruction softwares which allow you to generate a CAD surface from a digitized surface (The one I tried was SurfDriver.)

Personally and arguably, I prefer a structured FE mesh to an automatically generated mesh, for the reasons of quality and the control of mesh density. TrueGrid by XYZ Scientific is good software for generating a structured mesh and it supports digitized surfaces (in ASCII/binary Viewpoint format as well as IGES format). You can generate high quality meshes if you are willing to spend enough time to understand the topology of the structure to be meshed and come up with a good meshing strategy."

Name withheld by request.

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