Case Study: Cornell University achieves weeks-to-days horse airway CFD file preparation with Materialise's Mimics Innovation Suite (Remesh)

Cornell University Swaps Horses

Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biological and Environmental Engineering team faced a time-consuming bottleneck: converting CT scans of a racehorse’s nasal cavity, nasopharynx and larynx into high-quality surface meshes suitable for CFD. The complex, thin-walled and sharp anatomical geometry required very fine triangulation and weeks of manual pre-processing. To overcome this, Cornell worked with Materialise and evaluated the Mimics Innovation Suite’s Remesh technology.

Materialise used the Mimics Innovation Suite’s Remesh tools to perform global remeshing and targeted local optimization (grouping, deletion/refill and smoothing), producing a surface mesh that could be directly transformed into a volume mesh for CFD. Materialise returned an optimized file in a few days, cutting file preparation time from several weeks to about two days, enabling the CFD solver to run smoothly. As a result, Cornell purchased the Remesh module and reported significant time savings while maintaining CFD accuracy and reliability.

Cornell University

Vineet Rakesh

Biological and Environmental Engineering Department