Missing functions in meshtools

[guillaumechauvat]

There aren't many functionalities implemented in meshtools right now. A few easy functions would be potentially useful:

• Generating a box. This is trivial and hasn't been done before because the native Nek5000 tool genbox does it, but having it in pymech would allow using it as a building blocks for more complex meshes.
• A function to map geometries, for example to map a [0, 1]×[0, 1] box to an arbitrary shape with four corners. This is also trivial and would allow for generating more complex meshes.
• Coons patches? (trivial using the two functions above)
• A function to generate the outside of a circle.
• Functions to add, delete or change boundary conditions for velocity, temperature and passive scalars.

More complicated and speculative:

• A function to generate a cylinder-box junction.
• Integrating my airfoils script in some way. Perhaps by generating a boundary-layer mesh and returning some kind of analytic representation of the outer boudary. Then, combined with the functions above it might be possible to write a tutorial for generating a complete airfoil mesh with a boundary layer and a few free-stream blocks.
• Getting inspired by Vitor's extrude_refine function to perform some kind of mesh refinement.

Feel free to add anything to this list!

[ashwinvis]

Visualize the mesh as a

• 2D slice / 3D
• wireframe / pseudo-colour
• static / interactive

plot

[guillaumechauvat]

Do you have an idea of what library to use? For 3D or large meshes I don't think matplotlib is the way to go, maybe some OpenGL library, but I don't want to add dependencies that can break easily either.

[guillaumechauvat]

wxpython with pyOpenGL seems to work. I'll start with that, and if there are objections I can switch to something else.

[ashwinvis]

No objections if it works on all OSs. Perhaps you can consider creating a subpackage called meshtools, so we can accomodate other visualization libraries in the future.