The CompSim-Geometry and Meshing Team is pleased to announce Version 16.18 of the Cubit® Geometry and Mesh Generation Toolkit. The following is a sampling of new capabilities and improvements introduced in Cubit® 16.18. See the Cubit® 16.18 Release Notes for a complete list, which includes many resolved user tickets and new capabilities developed in support of the Next Generation Simulation (NGS) initiative.
What’s New…
Meshing
The accuracy of sizes in resulting meshes is now improved by correcting an issue with associating sizing information from a background Exodus mesh to the resulting mesh.
When triangle meshing it is now possible to use the lower bound interval setting to ensure a minimum number of elements along a curve. Previously, this setting was only effective when doing quadrilateral meshing.
When adding a node to be respected for tet meshing, it is now possible to specify a size with that node. When given a size, the resulting tets surrounding that node will have a size matching the user supplied size. This may be useful when wanting refinement at certain locations within a tet mesh.
Geometry Preparation Capabilities
There is now a command to create a frustum that tightly fits an input volume. The axis of the frustum is automatically computed. In most cases it will be correct but in complicated cases that are not correct, users can guide the creation by supplying the optional axis parameter.
Bounding frustum created for a volume
A previous command to create a cylinder that tightly bounds an input volume has been made more general. The previous version required the input volume to contain cylindrical or circular features to guide the cylinder creation. This is no longer required. Additionally, an optional axis parameter has been added to guide the cylinder creation in the even an incorrect axis is computed.
Bounding cylinder created for a spring volume
Miscellaneous
Cubit (.cub) files have a 4GB addressing limitation and Cubit® will now detect on attempt to write out files exceeding this limit. When this limit is detected, an error is printed out. This will help users know that their file is unreadable.
While Cubit® is compatible with multiple versions of Python 3, the version of Python included within the distribution is now Python 3.9. This replaces the previous version of 3.7. 3.9 was chosen to remain compatible with minimum operating system versions.
When a Python script contains tab indentation as opposed to indenting with spaces, Cubit® can now process the script correctly. This means Cubit® can now handle those files the same as if the Python interpreter was used to process those files.
New get_nearby_entities function, available through the Cubit® Python interface, allows a user to get the list of nearby entities of type curve, surface or volume.
How to Get it…
Cubit® is available to anyone on the Sandia LANs. Cubit® 16.18 will now run automatically from the Linux command prompt, replacing Cubit® 16.16. It is also licensed free of charge for government use outside of Sandia. If you are a current Cubit® licensed user, you may get Cubit® 16.18 by visiting and following the instructions on the Cubit® Download page. See Cubit® Licensing for information on obtaining a license.
How You Can Learn More…
The Cubit® 16.18 Release Notes provide a description of all the new features included in Cubit® 16.18. For detailed information follow the links to the online users manual.
Classroom tutorials are advertised on the Cubit® Tutorial Webpage, where you can also find a download for self-guided tutorials.
For more information contact, Cubit® Product Owner Ryan Viertel.
