Gridder: free version
Windows® 64-bit, version 10 and higher (33.8 MBytes): gridder58_free.exe. The current program version is 5.8 from 07/03/2026. See the Release Notes for changes and bug fixes.
SHA-256: 31377c61609cbeb8c70c7df87284553a4404b78bf4980b22c3cedeaf49f8a132
SHA-512: 4578a2d365aa5782537f83ddd317d36b82fd4ce2ec1fe725a00ea9cb3d09830b96826b2e495d00067dca35958285b7943aff3a6745bcb11d6aff999f8319f1dd
Installation instructions
In order to perform the installation, you need to have administrator rights. Run the self-extracting executable and follow through the few steps of the installation process. Unless there is anything you really have to change, it is safer to stay with the default settings. The default installation location is: "C:\Program Files\Gridder5_free". In case you overwrite any previous version, we recommend to reset all menu and keyboard settings by using the menu option Windows - Tool Bars and Docking Windows - Customize.
The user's manual is located in the folder "manual". The manual can also be invoked from within Gridder (requires a pdf reader). In the folder "examples", you can find data files of various popular test cases. Finally, folder "CustomFormat" contains sources and VisualStudio® project for a plugin that you can use to save meshes in your own file format.
You can employ the free version for evaluation, learning and testing purposes. Note that it can generate only a limited number of grid elements (32,000 in 2D and 750,000 in 3D). Unlike in the commercial version, it is possible to set up just one grid region.
The above YouTube video shows how Gridder can be configured and used to generate 2-D unstructured mesh with viscous sublayers. The example geometry is the RAE 2822 airfoil - a popular test case for turbulence modeling in transonic flow.
The video below demonstrates the basic steps of 3-D grid generation process, starting with a CAD model through to the finished viscous mesh:
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