- Grid format transform - from .Patran to .Ngp
The code is made by me independently during the work period as a Research Engineer at AMEC, Shanghai, China. The purpose is to fasten design/simulation process in using MONACO, a. DSMC (Direct Simulation Monte Carlo) solver developed by Prof. Iain Boyd's group at the University of Michigan. However, the grid format accepted by MONACO is an out-dated format - NGP (National Grid Project), which is not supported by any prevalent commercial grid generation software (Gridgen, GAMBIT, CFD-GEOM) known, by which most of engineering grids were made. (The NGP files contains coordinates of grid points, boundary type, boundary edge points, cell construct, cell type ). Prior to this, the grids were generated directly through manually input C program, which would take at least 1 day for each grid by senior research fellows. If the grid is complicated, there would be impractical to make it out. I perfectly solved this problem with an idea of transforming one selected format to .NGP in order to fasten the grid generation. After one week, I made an .exe through Fortran. This programme is capable of automatically transforming Sing-Block/Multi-Blocks and Structured/ Unstructured .PATRAN to .NGP files within seconds. In the final, other colleagues easily learned how to use my code.