The meshing glossary.
Clear, practical definitions of the CFD-meshing terms engineers actually search for — written by people who mesh for a living.
Oil & gas / subsurface
CO₂ storage meshing
CO₂ storage meshing is the construction of a simulation grid for a faulted, layered saline aquifer and its sealing caprock so a solver can predict how the injected CO₂ plume migrates and becomes trapped.
ReadCorner-point grid
A corner-point grid is a logically Cartesian reservoir grid built from vertical pillars and eight corner points per cell, letting hexahedral cells follow horizons and faults while keeping a structured i, j, k index.
ReadFault-conforming grid
A fault-conforming grid is a mesh whose cell faces lie exactly on the fault surfaces, so a fault acts as a true internal boundary with its own transmissibility rather than a stair-stepped approximation.
ReadPEBI grid
A PEBI (perpendicular-bisector) grid is a Voronoi grid whose cell faces are the perpendicular bisectors between neighboring nodes, giving the orthogonality that a reservoir simulator's two-point flux scheme depends on.
ReadReservoir simulation grid
A reservoir simulation grid is the set of cells that discretizes a reservoir so a flow simulator can solve mass balance cell by cell, using transmissibilities to move fluids between neighboring cells.
ReadMeshing
Boundary layer meshing
Boundary layer meshing is the process of building thin, stacked prism (inflation) layers next to walls to resolve the steep velocity and temperature gradients of the near-wall region.
ReadPolyhedral mesh
A polyhedral mesh fills a volume with many-faced cells (typically around 12–14 faces each) that give more neighbors per cell than tetrahedra, improving gradient accuracy at lower cell counts.
ReadBoundary layer
First cell height
First cell height is the thickness of the mesh cell nearest a wall, chosen so the near-wall spacing hits a target y⁺ for the turbulence model in use.
Ready⁺ (y-plus)
y⁺ (y-plus) is a dimensionless distance from a solid wall that measures how well the near-wall mesh resolves the boundary layer relative to the flow's viscous length scale.
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