Software and Applications

• Here’s a brief video on how to mesh for plastic injection molding in SolidWorks.
• In case you missed it, a drop of asphalt finally fell after 69 years in the famous pitch drop experiment. And you can see it on video.
• Two news items from Tecplot:
  • Tecplot is looking for beta testers of the latest version of Tecplot 360. You’ll have the opportunity to try out the new Qt-based GUI, improved performance for large results files, and more. Sign up here.
  • Tecplot RS 2013 Release 1 is now available.
• CD-adapco released STAR-CD and es/ice v4.20.
• Some CFD is used in the exploration of capillary flow of amorphous metal.
• Symscape published Part 2 of their two-part article on wind tunnel versus free air simulations.
• Two news items about engineering in “the cloud.”
  • SimScale announced the official release of their online platform for engineering simulation.
  • Ciespace scheduled a webinar on CFD in the Cloud for 06 August.

Reservoir simulation results showing two faults and streamlines. Image from Tecplot RS.

How Dangerous is CFD?

First a LinkedIn discussion then an a podcast and article on Desktop Engineering and now a commentary here on AFM [because I'm quoted in the article].

Agree or disagree: It’s dangerous to simplify FEA and make it accessible for the masses. [Note: I automatically substituted CFD for FEA. It changes nothing about the debate.]

The original author, Kenneth Wong, worded the question masterfully [IMO] to maximize the debate. Before answering, let’s dissect and defuse Kenneth’s word choices.

dangerous – Driving a car may be the most dangerous thing any of us do because it carries with it the constant threat of death, serious bodily harm, and expensive property damage. Is CFD that dangerous? I’d say no. If on the other hand Kenneth is using dangerous as a synonym for “risky” then there’s certainly always the risk that CFD will result in wrong answers. Wrong answers introduce risk into the design and manufacture of products.

simplify – One might be tempted to think that by simplify Kenneth means the reductio ad absurdum of CFD into a toy. I’m certain he means the development and deployment of CFD tools that don’t require a PhD and years of solver algorithm development experience to use. For example, I don’t have to be Mario Andretti to drive my car. Nor should I have to know what a Hessian is to run a CFD code.

masses – Whenever I read “masses” used in this context I’m reminded of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty that reads in part “Your huddled masses yearning to breath free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” I’m fairly certain Kenneth isn’t comparing non-expert CFDers to “huddled masses” or “wretched refuse.” Nor do I think he believes CFD needs to be used by the random person on the street. He’s simply referring to all the engineers out there who could benefit from the use of simulation but don’t know what a Hessian is.

These three interpretations are why I don’t think it’s dangerous to simplify CFD for the masses. It is not risky to develop and deploy CFD tools that can be applied by non-analyst engineers. It’s not risky, but it’s not easy either.

Implicit in all of this is the user’s responsibility to know what they’re doing and to have sufficient knowledge of engineering fundamentals to know if the answers being computed are – if not good – not bogus. It implies an organization that’s made the appropriate investment in tools and training and validation and verification.

What do you think? Comment here or at DE or on LinkedIn.

How Far Upstream Should Simulation Be Performed?

Touching on some of the same topics as the “dangerous CFD” discussion, Tech4PD Episode 11 features a debate on exactly where and how early in the design process simulation should be introduced.

Watch the video and share your opinion.

News in Brief

• Autodesk wants to hire a Product Manager Simulation CFD in Charlottesville, VA.
• Submit an image by 31 August for CD-adapco’s 2014 calendar contest and maybe you’ll win an iPad mini.
• A preliminary list of presenters and topics is available for the next Open Source CFD International Conference.
• The EnSight blog shares the news that NAFEMS is looking for someone to write a book on CFD postprocessing.
• Congratulations to FY Fluid Dynamics‘ 3-year anniversary. Help them plan for their future by completing a survey.

Just a Rainbow in Candle Smoke

Check out this tiny little rainbow in the plume of smoke from an extinguished candle. I’m surprised this hasn’t already appeared on FY Fluid Dynamics. (source)

A tiny rainbow appears in the smoke from this extinguished candle flame.

CFD Then and Now

When you have 40 minutes, spend the time with CD-adapco and Chad Jackson as the latter takes a look at CFD Then and Now.

• With respect to CFD now, “meshing is almost hands free.”
• CFD that’s tightly integrated or embedded into CAD allows true design-cycle analysis or even pre-CAD simulation. [This raises the question "What comes first, the CAD or the simulation?" But really it goes back to the more fundamental issue of design as a functional vs. geometric activity.]
• “The quality of the mesh doesn’t effect the quality of the results anymore.”
• Removing many of the barriers to entry to CFD allows simulation driven design.
• Organizations who use CFD may give themselves a competitive advantage.

Screen capture from a video on CD-adapco’s website of Chad Jackson talking about CFD Simulations Then and Now

Cloud

• SolidSmack takes a look at SimScale for cloud-based engineering analysis and call it “the most complete set of simulation tools available yet.” Based on that, I went to SimScale’s website and watched some of their CFD videos. It appears they are using OpenFOAM for fluids simulations.
• Rescale has added the open source CFD code Gerris to their cloud-based software portfolio.

Applications

• Properties Magazine includes an article written by IMAGINiT on the use of CFD for ventilation performance in buildings.
• CFD provided insight into erosion of the Great Sphinx on Egypt’s Giza Plateau. (As first seen on Symscape’s blog where a low-res simulation was performed using Caedium CFD.) Purchase required for access to the full paper.
• Speaking of IMAGINiT, MarketWatch reports on their expanding CFD consulting business.

Streamlines from a CFD simulation of erosion on the Giza Plateau. Image from Science Direct.

News & Events

• The 8th International Conference on CFD will be held 24-29 July 2014 in Chengdu, China. The call for abstracts is now open with a due date of 15 December.
• Congratulations to FY Fluid Dynamics for being named to Wired magazine’s list of the best reporters, writers, and thinkers on the internet.
• On 20-25 July 2014 in Barcelona the 11th World Congress on Computational Mechanics, 5th European Conference on Computational Mechanics, and 6th European Conference on CFD will be held. The conferences include numerous mini-symposia on CFD related topics. Abstracts are due on 29 November, full papers on 28 February.
• CFD Support Ltd. has released Turbomachinery CFD, an OpenFOAM-centric suite of software and supporting materials.
• Visualizing Data presents the best of the visualization web for July 2013.

It’s All About the Mesh

• In a short video you can see a new feature for Scan & Solve in Rhino that allows mesh resolution to be visualized.
• Convergent Science says It’s All About the Mesh [and who can argue with that?] and proceeds to identify some benefits of cut-cell Cartesian grids.
• Coincidentally, Symscape also weighs in on Cartesian grids.

Cut cell Cartesian grid from Convergent Science

What is the Sound of Wet Hands Clapping?

Yuk. No one wants to know why you’re clapping your wet hands – just don’t stand too close. But many people want to know why a thin fluid film compressed between two plates becomes unstable and breaks down into jets and droplets. Think oil refining and separation.

Liquid sheet resulting from squeezing a thin fluid layer. Image from Science Daily.

Software

• The SU2 CFD solver can now be run on the SimScale platform.
• Materialise released Magics 18 for working with discrete data for 3D printing.
• Beta CAE released ANSA v14.2.2.
• Siemens PLM released Femap 11.1. Videos of the new features are available here.
• If nothing else, Autodesk’s Project Shapeshifter shows what kind of 3D interaction can be done with a cloud-based application. At best, you can create and download 3D printable models.
• Lattice Technology released a new version of XVL Player, a free product for viewing 3D datasets.

Autodesk Project Shapeshifter. [I have no idea what I'm doing.]

Jobs

• BMW in Munich has an opening for a Development Engineer in CFD Simulation.
• There’s an opening for a CFD Process Engineer in London.

Applications

CFD solution for a ship hull at 45 degrees of yaw. Image from Marine Link.com.

• If you have a tug boat you want to get certified, you can now do that with CFD and without extensive testing.
• Desktop Engineering writes about where you might consider running your CFD calculations: on a your desktop, on a cluster, or in the cloud.
• CD-adapco has made available many videos of presentations from their STAR conferences. (registration required)
• You can read the paper and watch the presentation by ATA Engineering on multi-physics simulations of a hypersonic vehicle. (From the Simulia Community Conference, registration required.)

CFD solution for a notional hypersonic vehicle showing Mach number on the symmetry plane and temperature on the vehicle. Image from a paper by ATA Engineering.

Viz, Hardware, & More

• Two notable items from Tecplot:
  • Tecplot shares their version of the chicken and the egg story in describing how their new, high-performance “subzone load on demand” feature works.
  • Their insights from their visit to the IEEE Vis Conference involve hardware’s impact on vis [viz?].
• AMD announced the FirePro S10000 supercomputing graphics card with CFD as one of its targeted applications.
• Are we really at the dawn of a Napster era for 3D content? And what about a “Redoubled effort on community sourced 3D reconstruction libraries and application software (e.g. Point Cloud Libraries and Meshlab), with perhaps even an attempt made to commercialise these offerings (like the Red Hat model).”
• The deadline for submitting abstracts for the ASME 2014 Verification and Validation Symposium is 26 January.
• Microfluidics Weekly is a new publication from the folks at CFDpaper.com.

Our Lady of the Grids

Structured grids (i.e. mapped meshes for you FEA folks) show up in the darndest places. This time it’s a window at the Church of St. Martin in the Fields in London. The artist, Shirazeh Houshiary, said about her work “This tension fascinates me and it’s at the core of my work.”

Since she mentions tension she must be more familiar with meshing than I thought. Also note that this is obviously a high order mesh as indicated by the curved edges of the cells around the central ellipse.

The east window of the Church of St. Martin in the Fields, London, was designed by Shirazeh Houshiary. Image from My Modern Met.

News

• Intelligent Light won a 2nd HPC Innovators Award from IDC for their work on analyzing large CFD datasets. The award was presented at SC13, the supercomputing conference. A webinar on 22 January with Intelligent Light and Cray will describe the technology behind this achievement.
• If you’re one of those jaundiced people who believe that CFD stands for Colorful Fluid Dynamics, this CFD code is for you: an ASCII based implementation of the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method. [As a fan of ASCII art back in the day I found this to be pretty darn cool.]

Screen capture from a video of a Simscale CFD simulation of a valve. Click image for video.

Software

• Geomagic now provides 3D printer drivers: CAD system, 3D print, straight to 3D printer. A very interesting application of meshing must be in those drivers.
• SpaceClaim Engineer 2014 is now available featuring multi-threading for performance improvement, a web-based model viewer, a new surface simplification tool, and more.
• MSC Software released MSC Nastran 2013.1.
• Fire Dynamics Simulator 6.0.1 was released.
• DEVELOP3D reviewed midasNFX for FEA analysis.

Events

• ERCOFTAC’s Hybrid RANS-LES Methods for Industrial CFD – IV will be held 22-23 May 2014 at the George Washington University.
• CD-adapco’s special deals on early registration for the STAR Global Conference expire on 31 December.
• The next annual meeting of the CFD Society of Canada will be held on 1-4 June 2014 in Toronto.

Business

• Dassault Systemes acquired 3D visualization software firm Realtime Technology.
• Altair acquired electromagnetics software firm EMSS.
• Exa reported a 12% growth in income for 2013 Q3 relative to the same period last year. Included in that $14.1 million total is an 8% growth in license income and a 30% growth in project revenue.

Applications

• LearnCAx writes about the CFD simulation of electrostatic precipitators.
• Desktop Engineering shares two non-traditional CFD applications, one of which was an Autodesk simulation of the airflow through and over Heinz Field, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team.
• The white paper The A to Z of Breaking a World Water Sport Record is available for free (with registration) from Mentor Graphics via Engineering.com.

Hull pressure contours from a FloEFD solution are superimposed on this photograph of a racing boat. From the paper referenced above.

Jobs

• There’s an opening for a CFD Team Lead in Dearborn, Michigan.
• In Santa Ana, California there’s an opening for a Principal Software Engineer – Mesh Generation.

FYFD’s Insight into Social Media and Fluid Dynamics Outreach

During November’s APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting, Nicole Sharp presented some findings obtained from surveying the readers of her fluid dynamics blog, F%^$ Yeah Fluid Dynamics.

• The blog has 180,000 followers and nearly 14,000 unique visitors per month.
• Roughly half the readers are in the 20-29 age range.
• Even though interesting photographs attract readers, it’s the explanation of various phenomena that keep them coming back.
• 29% of readers have been positively influenced by FYFD to pursue fluid dynamics in their schooling or career.

Because FYFD’s audience desires even more content (more frequent, longer, more original posts) the question Nicole poses to the community is how to best meet those desires in a way that benefits the field of fluid dynamics.

Read Nicole’s presentation slides from APS/DFD here.

Meshing the Ocean

I had heard that researchers simulating oceanographic flows preferred Cartesian grids but this is taking it a bit too far. The photograph below shows a phenomena called a cross sea state in which two systems of waves intersect at oblique (and in this case, right) angles.

A cross sea wave state. Photographed from the Lighthouse of the Whales at Ile de Re. Image from Wikipedia. First seen on Neatorama.

High Performance Computing & Cloud

• NAFEMS asks that you participate in their survey on use of HPC in engineering simulation. The survey’s results will be revealed at the 2015 NAFEMS World Congress.
• Jetstream will be a new NSF cloud computing resource with the aid of a $6.6 million grant.
• NSF also spent over $9 million on a new supercomputer called Bridges.
• “Web-based CAD is just too funky to be useful in an efficient way to end-users.” Agree? Disagree? [Let’s just say that my personal experience indicates that porting an existing application to the cloud so it can be run via a web browser is WAY more difficult that porting to a traditional platform and many customer expectations are WAY too unrealistic.]

Software

• Mentor Graphics released the latest version of FloEFD with improvements in meshing, visualization, and physical modeling.
• Aerosoft released GASP 5.2 including mesh adaption and other features.
• MSC Software released the 2014 versions of Nastran and Patran.

A team led by NASA Langley engineers received an HPC Innovation Excellence Award for their use of CFD to study aeroacoustics. Image from NASA. Click image for article.

What’s in a Word?

• Here’s an article worth reading: All the truth about CAE and FEA Simulation Software in which the meanings of the phrase “easy to use” and the words accurate, fast, and affordable are decoded. My comments are:
  • All the superlatives we in the CAE software business use basically mean “better than we did before.” I stole this idea from Fred Brooks’ classic book on software development The Mythical Man-Month in which he wrote that the desire for automation really just means to make things work better than they work today. However, we and many other folks in the industry do try to quantify our superlatives by documenting accuracy and speed.
  • Affordability is a red-herring. What matters is value; what benefits do you accrue for the amount you pay?
  • A software program unto itself does not a product make. A product consists of the program plus all the other stuff that makes it actually useful, from installation, maintenance, upgrades, documentation, support, etc.
• Speaking of “ease of use,” Symscape delves into the issue of GUIs for CFD software.

Events

• Based on a few reader questions let me clarify what’s going on with the recently announced 1st Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Summit (ASSESS) coming up in early January. Attendance is by invitation only and all invitations have been sent and accepted. The rest of us can’t get in. [Channeling my inner Maverick, “Negative, Ghost Rider, the pattern is full.”] You can see the list of attendees on the conference website and it’s a “who’s who” of CAE. The rest of us will have to wait for the post-event press conference on 13 January and fortunately I’m on the list for that. I really look forward to learning more about this and again applaud the organizers, Cyon Research and intrinSIM.
• Beta CAE announced the 6th Beta CAE International Conference to be held 10-12 June 2015 in Thessaloniki, Greece. The call for papers is open with a due date of 27 February.
• The 15th FLOW-3D European Users Conference will be held on 02-03 June 2015 in Nice, France. Abstracts are due by 17 April.
• Kitware has shared a video of their SC14 experience.

Applications

Spray dryer simulation. Image from Dairy Reporter.com.

• Simulating spray dryers with CFD.
• Scalable fully implicit finite element flow solver with application to high-fidelity flow control simulations on a realistic wing design
• CFD for bicycles
• If you haven’t yet had your fill of Disney’s Frozen, watch this brief video detailing the science of animating snow.
• Here’s a video explaining the aerodynamics of the Porsche 911 Turbo. [Yawn. Not a car guy. I mean, all this “aerodynamics” and it can’t even get off the ground.]
• [To prove that I’m not biased against automotive CFD] here’s a brief article about Nissan’s V8 supercars that mentions CFD.
• CFD modeling of debris flow runout
• Heterogeneous mass transfer in fluidized beds by CFD

Experimental Fluids

• Next time you’re staring forlornly into the bottom of your empty whisky glass, consider the fluid mechanics that contributes to scotch whisky ring formation.
• Not a scotch drinker? OK, maybe you’re interested in why your beer is less likely to slosh and spill.

Jobs

• SimScale seeks to hire a CAE Sales Engineer in Munich.
• Tecplot wishes to hire a Strategic Account Manager.
• Speaking of Tecplot, they ask the rhetorical question Why One Trillion Cells?

Wrap Yourself in Luxurious Tets

With the holiday gift-giving season upon us, what better gift is there for the mesh generator on your list than this luxurious, cashmere, tetrahedral blanket. Imagine being swaddled in this surface mesh while viewing your most recent CFD solution.

It is said to be inspired by origami but I know a mesh when I see one. The Bloom Blanket sells for $300.

The tet-inspired cashmere Bloom Blanket. Image from bloomblanket.com. See link above.

Special “Just the Facts” Edition

CFD simulation of a skydiver superimposed on a photograph of same. Image from AL.com. Click image for article.

• The CFD Vision 2030 Study is covered by Hi-Tech CFD in MCAD Cafe with emphasis on turbulence modeling, HPC, and multidisciplinary simulations.
• Two articles on gender and STEM education/careers:
  • The Gender Confidence Gap in STEM Education via ENGINEERING.com
  • Toys for Boys? from Mentor Graphics
• Tech Soft 3D released HOOPS Visualize 2015.
• ASME is now accepting 400+ word abstracts for their 2015 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition.
• For those of you old enough to remember back when SGI was the computer to use for CFD, here’s a video called When SGI Ruled the World.
• Design for function, not geometry, with Autodesk’s Project Dreamcatcher.
• Optimizing a golf club‘s drag using CFD.
• The 27th International Conference on Parallel CFD will be held 17-21 May 2015 in Montreal.
• simFlow 2.0 is now available.
• FLOW-3D Version 11 is now available.
• ESI released VA One for vibro-acoustics.
• CFD Support published their newsletter for January 2015.
• Rhino users will probably like a free toolset for aircraft parametric geometry.
• Particle-in-Cell published their first newsletter of 2015.
• Tecplot and KARALIT have been working together on immersed boundary CFD.
• SimScale is making CFD tools available at no cost for academia.
• Intelligent Light released FieldView 15.
• Improving CFD in NX.

A twitter bot claims to allow you to polygonize yourself. Image from Visual News. Click images for article.

Pointwise

• Pointwise’s Dr. Steve Karman will participate in a webinar hosted by the Centre for Modeling and Simulation (CFMS) on 21 September to discuss high order CFD technologies. Dr. Peter Vincent from Imperial College London will also participate in the webinar. For more details, see the registration page.
• CFMS will also host a 20 November seminar at their Bristol and Bath Science Park location on Pointwise’s meshing technology to be delivered by Dr. Richard Matus. For more details, see the registration page.
• Pointwise will be in Stuttgart, Germany on 16 November for a 1-day workshop on Pointwise Training and Product Roadmap. This free event (pre-registration required) is part of our Let’s Talk Meshing series of events.

Steve MacDonald

• The CFD world lost a leader this month with the passing of CD-adapco’s president, CEO, and co-founder, Steve MacDonald. [I had only briefly met Steve once, so I can’t speak of him directly. Based on the people he surrounded himself with at CD-adapco, many of whom I know well, he was a good judge of character. His legacy is in good hands.]
• Monica Schnitger shares her impressions of the man here.

Events

• The 4th International Workshop on High-Order CFD Methods will be held 3-4 June 2016 in Crete.
• Registration is open for the STAR Global Conference 2016 (7-9 March, Prague).
• Desktop Engineering shares a preview of the COMSOL Conference 2015 (7-9 October, Boston).
• Applied CAx offers Femap and NX Nastran training on 19-23 October and a 1-day Femap Symposium on 23 September in Everett, WA.

Software

• Tecplot RS 2015 Release 1 is now available for visualizing oil and gas reservoir simulations. New features include support for NEXUS models and an equation editor. See what’s new in this video.
• foam-extend 3.2 is now available. foam-extend is a version of OpenFOAM that’s “open to community contributed extensions.”
• Flowmaster 1D CFD v7.9.4 is now available.
• PyFR is a multiple nominee for HPCWire’s annual readers’ choice awards. Vote here. (Registration required.)
• ParaView 4.4 is available for download.
• An updated version of Autodesk’s Project Arro is available.
• The SimScale platform was recently updated.
• RealFlow 2015 was launched for 3D visual effects.
• Shipflow 6 was released and its RANS solver is 10x faster.
• Cobalt Version 7 was released.

Computing

Record-setting gas turbine combustor simulation from ANSYS and Cray. Image from Aerospace Manufacturing and Design. See link below.

• ANSYS scaled Fluent to run on 129,000 cores of a Cray XC30 at 90% efficiency, eclipsing their previous performance by a factor of four. See related coverage of this news at Aviation Week (registration required).
• ENGINEERING.com reports on a new high performance computing center at Univ. of Michigan (with investment from NSF) called ConFlux to be used to solve massive simulations including CFD.
• Nor-Tech announced the available of their “Demo Cluster” HPC system for CFD.
• LBM code Sailfish was ported to a GPU cluster.

Programming

• SIAM’s list of the best 10 algorithms of the 20th century includes the Fortran optimizing compiler (1957).
• On a related note, this list of the 20 greatest computer programming inventions includes Fortran.
• AMD’s 3D rendering library, FireRender, is available for those wanting to generate photorealistic images. The SDK is based on C++ and OpenCL.
• ReScience “is a peer-reviewed journal that targets computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research, promoting new and open-source implementations in order to ensure that the original research is reproducible.”

Applications

• The 2015 Ford F-150 features aerodynamically designed “air curtains” over the wheels to reduce drag. [Not being a car guy, I never would’ve considered the aerodynamics of a pickup truck.]
• To appear unbiased to my car-loving friends, here’s something about the aerodynamics of the 2016 Aston Martin Vantage GTE.
• And there’s CFD use in the design of racing bikes.
• And [believe it or not] there’s CFD use in the design of sunglasses to wear while riding your racing bike.
• CFD was used to verify the performance of a ship hull.
• Researchers from Virginia Tech are using the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab to study transport phenomena in multiphase system (i.e. underground carbon sequestration, oil recovery, and contaminant transport).
• Nominations are being accepted for the Information is Beautiful Awards through 30 October.

The behavior of oil ganglia (yellow) can be observed as they are mobilized in an experimentally-imaged sandstone (the solid part of the sandstone is shown in blue). Image and caption from ORNL. See link above.

Business

• ESI reported a 14% increase in license revenue and a 5% decrease in services revenue during Q2. Total revenue for Q2 was slightly over €24 million.
• The global CFD market is expected to grow at 13.6% [Thank God, only 1 decimal place.] during 2014-2019 according to a report from Market Research Reports.
• CD-adpaco joined the Fluid Mixing Process consortium.
• Applied CCM, developers of the OpenFOAM derivative Caelus, are partnering with Celeritas Simulation Technology for sales and support of Suggar++ for overset grid assembly.
• Exa reported a 5% increase in license revenue and flat consulting income in Q2 for a total income for the quarter of $15.5 million.

Meshing and CAD

• The International Meshing Roundtable is coming up in a couple of weeks [Austin, TX – See you there.] and in advance of the meeting they’re conducting a survey on current situation and trends in meshing.
• You might want to follow this discussion on a grid independence study on LinkedIn.
• The folks at CFD Engine make the case for using Rhino as your CAD system for CFD. [In which I learned what the word duff means but still don’t understand its usage in the article.] Because they wanted to run CAD on the Mac, that limited their options somewhat. Also noted are Onshape, Autodesk Fusion360, and Caeses.
• Ralph Grabowski at WorldCAD Access is celebrating 30 years of writing about the CAD business.
• SolidWorks 2016 was launched.

…and the Arts

The exhibition CODE and NOISE features the turbulent flow visualization shown below and others from Cascade Technologies as part of a works by several artists that use software as a means of invoking ideas related to “the environment, memory, art history, data collection and surveillance.”

This CFD visualization is featured in Code and Noise, an exhibit in which artists use software to produce works that reflect on current events. Image from Cascade Technologies. See link above.

All I have is this tweet and its images but it looks like the Museum of Design in Atlanta is 3D printing what will be the tallest object in the Americas. I just looks like a mesh to me.

Bonus: This photo essay about NASA Ames Research Center comes with the subtitle This Used to Be the Future which only proves that two people can look at the same thing and come away with two different perspectives. This was done as part of a program at LACMA and elicited a question of morality.

News & Events

• Pointwise is now accepting applications for engineering internships for summer 2016.
• The 1st Brazilian Conference on CFD will be held on 16-18 June 2016 in Campina Grande. [Let me know if I translated the information about this event incorrectly.]
• Electronic Products Magazine named Mentor Graphics FloTHERM XT a product of the year.
• The first International Conference on the Finite Volume Method will be held in Beirut on 11-14 July 2016.
• Optimize the performance of a quadcopter and maybe win SimScale’s Drone Challenge. Entries due 29 Feb 2016.
• [More contests you say?] MSC Software’s Simulating Reality Contest is accepting entries up to 31 March 2016.
• A conference report from the 11th International Conference on CFD in the Minerals and Process Industries is available for download.
• The agenda has been published for the workshop on HPC-Based CFD for Offshore Renewable Energy.

Software

• Desktop Engineering shares information about ANSYS Fluent 17.0 including its new UI and workflow that promises 12% fewer clicks. The article includes a link to an ANSYS webinar for those who want to learn more.
• Intelligent Light describes their work on in-situ post-processing [I realize that phrase I just wrote is an oxymoron] in which solution data is saved and co-processed [that’s better] while the solver is running resulting in vast times and storage savings.
• IL also summarized their participation in the recent AIAA Hover Prediction Workshop.
• ESI launched ESI Cloud, a software as a service (SaaS) offering that includes OpenFOAM for CFD and is based on technology acquired from Ciespace. Read more about this in Desktop Engineering.

Applications

Numeca’s Wind Tunnel Free app for iPhone. See link below.

• Honda Racing posted a video explaining the “black art” of CFD.
• Numeca launched [at least I think this is new] WindTunnel CFD, a 2D CFD app for mobile devices. See image above.
• Symscape blogged about CFD for the small and medium sized business.
• Flow Science has written about recent improvements in their FlowSight post-processor: Part 1, Part 2.
• MeshLab JS v16.01, the in-browser version of MeshLab, was released and here’s a nice tutorial.
• Watch this video demonstration of Meshmixer 3.0.
• Read about how ANSYS is being used in the pharmaceutical industry.
• CFD for racing bikes: at Trek and at Zipp.
• CONSELF wrote about four ways your mesh can cause inaccurate CFD results. #3 lack of orthogonality.

ANSYS simulation of a reactor vessel. Image from LEAP CFD blog. See link above.

Polygonal Chocolate

Alert reader and meshing maven Dr. Daniel Zaide discovered these polygonal chocolate bars from Vancouver chocolatier Beta 5. Not only is the chocolate beautifully faceted, but the wrapper itself is meshed.

I can only infer from the fact that he sent us their Dark Force Bar (66% dark chocolate) that he’s making a Star Wars themed statement about where meshing falls in the CFD galaxy. Also, I’m finding it difficult to keep sticky chocolate fingerprints off my keyboard. Thank you, Dr. Zaide.

The Dark Force Bar from Vancouver chocolatier Beta 5. See link above.

P.S. Candy and other meshy gifts will indeed get you on our friends list.

Bonus: Gratuitously faceted beer making robot: the BrewBot. No one has sent us one of these. Yet.

Faceted customization of a BrewBot, a beer making robot. Image from brewbot.io. See link above.

News & Events

• If you recall last summer’s announcement of the National Strategic Computing Initiative, you might be interested to know that it is now appearing in the federal budget. An alphabet soup of federal government agencies are involved but DoE and NSF are budgeting $285 million and $33 million, respectively.
• The keynote speaker for this year’s CD-adapco STAR Global Conference is Martin Whitmarsh, CEO of Land Rover and former CEO of McLaren F1.
• Registration is open for DEVELOP3D Live, a 1-day event on design and manufacturing technology, to be held 31 March in Warwick, UK.

Gerald Farin

The world of geometry modeling and computer graphics lost a pioneer and leader earlier this month with the passing of Gerald Farin, author of perhaps the principle text on geometry modeling, Curves and Surfaces for Computed Aided Geometric Design (CAGD).

Software

AVL FIRE M. Image (c) AVL. See link below.

• DEVELOP3D reviewed SimScale’s cloud-based CFD and FEA platform, designed to target the issues of “cost and access to computational resources.”  Their freemium pricing model offers 3,000 compute hours for free as long as all your simulations are public.
• CONSELF (CONsulting by yourSELF) also offers a free Welcome plan for cloud-based CFD.
• And DEVELOP3D took a step back and wrote about how cloud-based simulation tools could and should behave. [Worth reading.]
• Speaking of SimScale, they seek your participation in a survey on “Industry 4.0” and it’s impact on the engineering community. Should take 5-10 minutes and you might win a prize.
• Symscape shows how co-processing can help you monitor progress of your CFD solution.
• KARALIT CFD v4.0 was released with new time dependent BCs, a k-epsilon turbulence model, and new licensing options.
• AVL List GmbH launched AVL FIRE M, a new CFD platform with improvements across the board. [I haven’t seen news about FIRE in a long time. This is a good thing.]

CFD solution computed using CD-adapco software by Nissan Motorsport. Image from Professional Motor Sport World. See link below.

Applications & Visualization

• Read about the 12 Pillars of 1D CFD from Mentor Graphics (registration required).
• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for December 2015.
• Nissan Motorsport using CD-adapco’s software to design their GT cars.
• Another article on CFD and motorsports.
• Robust, real-time hair simulation using hair meshes. [Luxurious!]
• CFD is being used to help surgeons prepare for operations on the human sinus.

Meshing Greatness

Who says meshing is dull? The new video for Greatness by Karma Fields featuring Talib Kweli is chock full of Voronoi polygons, Dirichlet tessellations, and overall faceted goodness. The video is rated mature for [one particular line in the] lyrics so it’s probably NSFW. Watch at your own risk.

Screen capture from the video Greatness by Karma Fields ft. Talib Kweli. See link above.

News & Events

The internet is losing its collective mind over this NASA video of a rocket plume made with a new high dynamic range camera. Click image for video (if you are the only person who has not yet seen this.)

• SimScale and Friendship Systems announced a collaboration based around the latter’s CAESES tool for parametric modeling.
• Microsoft announced an Open Source Partner Community.
• SGI has been acquired by HP Enterprise for $275 million.
• The NAFEMS World Congress 2017 will be held 11-14 June 2017 in Stockholm.
• Envenio wrote about 7 challenges CFD can solve. #2 “most CFD tools are incredibly accurate”.

Screen capture from a video showing die surface temperature from a simulation by FLOW-3D. Click image for article.

Software

• Via Desktop Engineering comes access to a 6-page PDF about what’s new in ANSYS 17 including Fluent, CFX, and SpaceClaim.
• October’s release of Tecplot 360 EX will include more compatibility with Loci-Chem, a SZL file converter, and more. Beta testers are sought. [From Tecplot’s SZL News email newsletter that I just now found out about.]
  • Also from Tecplot, video instructions on how to create Tecplot SZL files for improved performed.
• The summer issue of FLOW-3D news is available.
• STAR-CD v4.26 has new reaction models and is now available.

Applications

CFD simulation of a medical device (inhaler) by CD-adapco. Image from OINDP News. See link below.

• CFD for medical devices such as inhalers. See image above.
• More color map advice for better scientific visualization.

Mapping Color to a Museum’s Walls

Instead of seeing meshes where none exist or finding another example of stupid liquid tricks*, this week’s diversion is probably more related to visualization and the link above about color maps. Stephen Knapp creates site-specific light paintings with the aid of dichroic glass** that raise the issue of how we perceive art. First seen on Colossal, more seen on the artist’s website.

Stephen Knapp paints with light. See links above.

*Not a value judgement, just a play on words related to David Letterman’s stupid pet tricks.

**Glass that displays two colors under certain lighting conditions.

Bonus: “Few people appreciate engineering like artists.” GrabCAD shares examples of works of engineering currently on display in museums of art.

*** Special Christmas Eve Eve Day Edition ***

Software

• Intelligent Light announced the release of FieldView 16.1 for CFD results visualization and postprocessing and including the most resolved issues and feature requests in any recent FieldView release. See video below.
• Beta CAE released v17.0.3 of their software suite.
• CPFD released Barracuda Virtual Reactor 17.1 with performance improvements, both computational and setup time.
• 3D online modeling platform Vectary is now out of beta. The software combines “mesh modeling, subdivision modeling, and parametric design.”
• Open-source quadrature-based moment method code OpenQBMM has an updated website.
• MSC Software announced Easy5 2017, the latest version of their “advanced controls and systems simulation” software.

Screen capture of FieldView 16.1 in action on a dataset from FOI. Click image for video. See link above.

Applications

• A proposal to allow Formula 1 teams to use more CFD was voted down.
• Here are four things to consider before applying CFD to gas-fired emission control systems. #3 Can important details of the flow path be modeled with CFD?
• How ESI’s CFD and aeroacoustic tools are used to minimize wind noise inside a car.
• Citroen’s C3 WRC racer was designed, in part, with CFD.

A beautiful grid pic from CFD-Based Droplet Size Estimates in Emulsification Equipment. Image from mdpi.com. Click image for article.

Miscellaneous

• You have until 23 January to cast your vote for Tech Briefs magazine’s reader’s choice product of the year award. There are four CAE-related candidates: ANSYS AIM 17.2, MSC Software’s MARC 2015, Tecplot 360 EX 2016 Release 2, and Wolfram Mathematica 11.
• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for October 2016.
• Autodesk is EOLing (end-of-life-ing) T-Splines and 123D.
• Happy 1st birthday to Onshape.
• SimScale announced their academic program with on-demand courses and a special academic 6-month plan.
• Finland’s Aalto University has an open post-doc position in CFD modeling of dual fuel combustion.
• How close are we to CAD on portable/mobile devices? About 60%.
• CFD and production-level supercomputing.
• Read how Engility delivers HPC capabilities to its government customers.

From Pointwise

Aerospace and Defense Technology was kind enough to use a Pointwise V18 unstructured quad/hex mesh on their cover.

After a brief delay, we were informed that our poster for this year’s International Meshing Roundtable (combining the two contest geometries: a computer exhaust fan and the White House) was selected as Meshing Maestro.

Events

• The international convention on Shape, Solid, Structure, and Physical Modeling will be held in Berkeley, California on 19-23 June 2017. [I feel silly for never having heard of this event before.]
• Flow Science’s 17th FLOW-3D European Users Conference will be held in Barcelona on 5-7 June 2017. Abstracts are due 21 April.
• Our friends at Applied CCM shared their summary of the 20th Australasian Fluid Mechanics Conference. This event will next be held in 2018 at the University of Adelaide.
• Lloyds Register held a workshop on CFD modeling of full-scale marine vessels. Read the same news here but with pictures.

Mesh Plotter

Alert reader Jacob discovered a tool that seems perfect for drawing meshes, the AxiDraw V3 pen plotter. I’m old enough to remember when all printers were pen plotters and usually huge enough to draw blueprints. But now for a few hundred bucks you can have one on your desktop. Be sure to watch the video at the AxiDraw website to see all this plotter can do.

The AxiDraw seems perfect for drawing your meshes and their dual too. See link above.

Bonus: The Life Upfront blog is ending. [In which we read that I should be fired. For more reasons than mentioned.]

From our friends at TwinMesh. Beautiful. Click image for article.

Want to see more fun Xmas-related CFD imagery? Check out the #SimulationFriday hashtag on Twitter.

All About MSC

• The big news in the CAE business this week is MSC Software’s acquisition by Hexagon AB for US$834 million. MSC is one of the most storied names in the CAE business making its future very significant for the industry.
  • From MSC Software themselves.
  • Monica Schnitger thinks “it’s a perfect match.”  She also reports from MSC that “No change to MSC’s current product roadmap are planned.”
  • From DEVELOP3D: MSC helps Hexagon achieve their “smart connected factory vision in discrete manufacturing industries such as automotive and aerospace”

Software & Meshes

• ANSYS 18 was launched and includes ANSYS CFD Enterprise which itself includes all CFD solvers, several specialized solvers, geometry, meshing, and optimization. (See image below.)
• Some thoughts from SIMULIA on democratization of simulation.
• ANSYS also weighs in on democratization in ENGINEERING.com including 5 tips for choosing the right CFD software. #3 Are numerous training materials available live and online?
• SimScale shares news about recent updates including a mesh quality report.
• The EnSight blog features an article on mesh quality [one of my favorite topics].
• If you want to learn more about Femap, here’s a collection of Femap basic videos.
• Very cool [but very brief] article from 3D Systems about 3D scanning the Apollo F-1 engine. [Click the link just to see the pictures.]

Screen capture from a video illustration of harmonic CFD analysis now available in ANSYS 18. See link above.

Applications & Events

Optimized spillway design as simulated in FLOW-3D. Image from Flow Science. [Another beautiful CFD image.]

• The call for abstracts for the 17th FLOW-3D European Users Conference open now until 21 April. Early-bird registration is also available until that date.
• This year’s 3D Collaboration and Interoperability Congress (3D CIC) has been scheduled for 3-4 October in Golden, Colorado.
• And a reminder that the Code_Saturne User Meeting will be on 21 April in Paris.
• It’s time for Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for December 2016.
• Simerics and Friendship Systems will be collaborating on Geometric CFD Optimization, a tool for automatically generating design variations.

STAR-CCM+ simulation of blood flow. Image from a Siemens PLM article on use of simulation in medical clinical trials. [I fell in love with this image the moment I saw it.]

Order from Chaos (via Oaths)

From the title of her work shown below (Before After Oaths Gray 4), I can only assume that Marjorie Welish has generated meshes. Because when I get a mesh like the right half of her painting there are a lot of oaths uttered before I can get it into the form on the left.

Marjorie Welish, Before After Oaths Gray 4, 2013

As originally seen on Art News, this painting is from the artist’s exhibition at ART 3 Gallery in Brooklyn. I urge my friends in the NYC area to visit before the exhibition closes on 05 February. Failing that, explore the artist’s website to see these works, her Mondrian-esque paintings, and more.

Bonus: Pointwise is now on Instagram.

Software

• There are some very cool charting and graphing features coming in STAR-CCM+ v12. What they call Chart Highlighting includes hover effects, leader lines, multi-series editing, and more.
• Tecplot’s SZL technology (for smaller files and faster performance) has been integrated into NASA’s FUN3D solver.
• Esteco launched Volta, their enterprise product for access, sharing and reuse of simulation data in a multi-disciplinary environment.
• I just recently learned about Aither CFD, an open source, multi-block, structured grid RANS solver.

Column gas density from the “world’s highest resolution [10,048**3] simulation of turbulence ever done.” Image Federrath et al. Click here for paper.

News

• If you [like me] are fascinated by the results from fluid simulation software RealFlow (see image below), they’ve blogged about the solvers used under the hood.
• Beta CAE acquired their partner in Japan and Southeast Asia, Top CAE.
• Autodesk‘s CEO, Carl Bass, has stepped down.
• Flow Science has job openings for a developer, software engineer, and sales engineers.
• A brief article from Digital Engineering about linking test and analysis.
• SimScale asks (and answers) what is accuracy?
• The Exascale Computing Project has an industry council that includes Altair, ANSYS, and more.

Screen capture of a video on RealFlow’s website showing an example of their fluid simulation work – in this case a TV ad for Disney’s World of Color show. See link below. [Was there any doubt this is the example I’d use here?]

Events

• TFAWS 2017 (Thermal & Fluids Analysis Workshop) will be held 21-25 August in Hunstville.
• The 3rd Gmsh Workshop will be held 29-31 March in Lanzarote. [Being a geography-challenged American I had to research Lanzarote to discover it’s the eastern-most Canary Island and is nicknamed the “island of eternal spring.”]
• Website for the 12th OpenFOAM Workshop is now up.
• A video of Dr. Peter Vincent’s presentation, Toward the Industrial Adoption of GPU Accelerated CFD, from last year’s GPU Technology Conference is now online. [Full disclosure: Pointwise is mentioned.]

Screen capture from a video discussing the application of CFD to surfboard design. Read the article (which links to video).

Applications

• Tech Briefs magazine profiled some of NASA’s software and its impact on challenging problems. Codes mentioned include Loci-STREAM, Cart3D, and LAVA.
• Here’s a brief article about using CFD to study airflow patterns in a hospital operating room using ANSYS Fluent.
• And another brief article about use of FINE/Marine in the cloud for ship hull CFD.
• By integrating EDA and CFD you can do cool simulations of integrated circuit’s thermal environments as reported by Mentor Graphics. (See image below).
• CFD as part of a method for predicting left ventricular thrombosis. (Registration required.)

Thermal simulation of an integrated circuit die. Image from Mentor Graphics. See link above.

A CFDer’s Artist

Art doesn’t get more directly applicable to CFD than this. Mark J. Stock’s work “explores the tension between the natural world and its simulated counterpart.”

In particular, his video work entitled Smoke Fire Water (see image and link below) hits very close to home for me. In the artist’s own words: “Virtual fluids are nothing of the sort. To define a virtual fluid in 0s and 1s requires an underlying data structure (as does defining anything digitally). When stripped of all normal visual context, a fluid reveals this (computational) structure. These are the building blocks upon which virtual simulations of reality are based.”

I highly recommend you explore the artist’s website.

Mark J. Stock, Smoke Water Fire, 2008. This is a screen capture of the video. MUST WATCH.

Bonus: The photo below is neither a simulation nor an experiment. Fluid Porcelain is just what it sounds like: a porcelain bowl designed and produced by Aylin Bilgic [sorry about the lack of diacriticals] to have the appearance of a fluid. I can’t imagine this being shipped to a buyer and arriving in one piece but if any one of you decides to make a purchase, send me a photo when you receive it.

Fluid Porcelain by Aylin Bilgic. Image from Behance. See link above.

ASSESS

• The ASSESS Initiative‘s website is now live. Quoting from their website, ASSESS “is a broad reaching multi-industry initiative with a primary goal to facilitate a revolution of enablement that will vastly increase the availability and utility of engineering simulation, leading to significantly increased usage and business benefits across the full spectrum of industries, applications and users.”
• ASSESS’ primary event is the ASSESS Congress, the 2017 edition of which will be held 01-03 Nov in Potomac, Maryland. (Invitation only.)

The Holovect is “the world’s first holographic desktop display” according to its Kickstarter page. Image from Holovect. [Will we someday be able to view more than one tet at a time? If you could, would you?]

[Not Fake] News

• Monica Schnitger shares astute observations from ANSYS’ Q4 results including the following that I found notable.
  • The company has its sights set on doubling revenue from US$1 billion to US$2 billion.
  • During Q4, the company closed 7 deals worth more than US$10 million each.
  • M&A and flexible licensing options are two paths to their revenue goal.
• 3D Systems experienced revenue growth in 2016 Q4 of 6% and is forecasting revenue growth of 2-8% for 2017. [My interest in 3D printing has a lot to do with the fact the process takes as input a mesh. And in at least one case, its output is a mesh too.]
• Envenio summarizes ENGINEERING.com’s survey on how engineers get information.
  • Vendor websites and digital publications are at the top of the list.
  • 40% report getting info from social media.
  • 80% will research online (i.e. Google) before contacting a company.

Hydrodynamic simulations have always fascinated me from the geometry standpoint: the combination of design (dam, spillway) and natural (riverbed, coastline) geometry. But the CFD simulations themselves are equally challenging with cool results. The simulation shown above was done by BC Hydro using FLOW-3D. The image comes from an article in CFD Review. [I think I’ve posted about this application before. Sorry for the duplication.]

Events

• ICYMI, Pointwise’s webcast on Glyph Scripting with Python is available for your viewing pleasure.
• The Thermal & Fluids Analysis Workshop (TFAWS) 2017 will be held at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center on 21-25 August. The deadlines for abstracts and final manuscripts have not yet been posted.
• As reported by Inside HPC, the call for papers has opened for SC17 [nee Supercomputing] to be held this November in Denver. Abstracts are due 20 March.
• Melanie Mitchell was announced as the keynote speaker for this year’s COFES (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software). Mitchell’s expertise in system complexity dovetails with 2017’s COFES theme of Complexity and Transformation. Note: COFES is an invitation only event. [My favorite quote about complexity is “Things can be complex; they need not be complicated.]
• The 5th International Workshop on High Order CFD Methods will be held the weekend prior to AIAA SciTech 2018, 06-07 January, in Orlando.

Another cool CFD application done in FLOW-3D, this time for microfluidic particle sorting. Image from Flow Science. Click link for article and video. [This is where your tricorders are going to come from, Trekkies.]

Software

Friendly reader Matt shared this gorgeous image of an SR-71 CFD simulation rendered using STAR-CCM+’s new ray tracing capability. Read more in Matt’s blog post. [I’m betting screen savers or desktop backgrounds made from this and similar images would be very popular.]

• NASA has a Tumblr [not a surprise] and here they’re promoting 5 NASA software codes that can be freely downloaded and 3 of them are CFD [kinda surprising]: TetrUSS, KNIFE (part of FUN3D), and Cart3D.
• Siemens PLM Software officially launched STAR-CCM+ v12.02.
• Snas3D is a [new to me] structured, multi-block RANS solver.
• CEI announced EnSight 10.2 for CFD post-processing. This updated of their software is said to have improved the quality and performance of visualizations.
• Onshape shared 10 principles for improving user experience and the one that hit home for me was #10 Think about decisions, not options.
• ENGINEERING.com introduces us to cloud-based, thermal CFD startup Diabatix.

CFD simulation done on the SimScale platform comparing passive versus active ventilation. Image from SimScale.

Facets That Unite Us

It’s not often that my desire to see meshes and facets everywhere and my wife’s enjoyment of the textile arts intersects, but here we have it. What you see below is the Best in Show winner from QuiltCon 2017. Yes, that’s a quilt. As Australian quilter Katherine Jones says, she was inspired by a princess cut diamond to piece together cuts of solid colored fabric.

Katherine Jones, bling, 2017.

Bonus: Many terms in our industry get overused to the point of confusion. For example, I would make the case that “the cloud” and “democratization” are used so frequently and casually that they mean different things to different people. The same maybe true of “exascale” as pointed out in this commentary by the VP of IDC’s high performance computing group. Floating point computations may no longer be the king of HPC because of the varying demands of other applications that desire exascale (data mining, IoT, etc.). So we need to be clear in our communication and expectation of exascale systems, at least until (as the author points out) we hit the next major milestone, zettaflops. [Not to be confused with Catherine Zeta Jones’ performance in Playing for Keeps.]

Final Note: I wrote this while listening to electronic music described as a “cognition enhancer” and recommended to me by someone whose opinion I respect. Only you can decide, however, if it made this blog post any better than the previous ones.

Applications

• Back in 1995 it was thought that “automotive design and engineering could be paperless within three years.” Tossing aside the quaint idea of “paperless,” the article Engineering revolution: CAD/CAE advancements changing vehicle development illustrates how the intervening decades have proved to be a continuous evolution of tools and technologies.
• SimScale shares a customer success story involving simulation of radial fans. See image below.

Radial fan simulation by Dr. Heiser and SimScale. Image from SimScale. See link above. Note: image has been cropped to better fit this document.

Events & News

• AUVSI XPONENTIAL, “the largest global community of leaders in drones, intelligent robotics and unmanned systems” will be held 8-11 May 2017 in Dallas.
• ESI acquired Scilab, an open-source MATLAB alternative.

Software

As a guy who cut his teeth on structured grid generation and elliptic PDE methods, this animation caught my eye and held my attention. It’s from an announcement of a workshop on Kangaroo Physics (a physics/constraint solver plugin for Grasshopper).

• Scan&Solve Pro for Rhino (automated, no-preprocessing, basic structural simulation) was released.
• CEI launched EnSight 10.2 for CFD postprocessing and visualization.

Grid Farm

When you’re a millionaire art collector, you can afford to purchase 700 acres in Auckland and ask some of the world’s best sculptors to populate it with their best works. The result is the Gibbs Farm.

Not unexpectedly, in the first post I saw on Unusual Places the array of quads shown below immediately pegged my structured grid meter. As described on the Gibbs Farm website, the contrast between the grid of perfect squares and the lush natural terrain is what Red Cloud is all about.

Leon van den Eijkel, Red Cloud Confrontation in Landscape, 1996. Image from Unusual Places. See links above.

P.S. I apologize for the paucity of news this week and possible/likely repetition of old news. Chrome decided (for reasons unknown) to reorganize my bookmarks again making this week’s compilation more of a housekeeping and rediscovery exercise. The problem is likely caused by the extreme number of bookmarks I retain. The last time I backed-up my bookmarks to HTML the resulting file was 33 MB.

Applications

• Despite never having broken a bone, this article on the use of simulation to design casts helps me understand why I’ve seen so many incoming college students choose biomedical majors. Abaqus even has a knee simulator add-on.
• CFD is applied on meshes with 500 million cells to refine the aerodynamics of the BMW M4 DTM. See image below. [And despite a lot (OK, some) googling, I couldn’t find out what DTM means.]
• Check out this real-time Navier-Stokes simulation on GPUs.

CFD simulation of a BMW M4 DTM. Image from the BMW blog. See link above.

Software

• CONSELF has developed a CGNS to OpenFOAM file converter.
• ENGINEERING.com shares more information about 3D Precise Mesh, the new module from Spatial that includes meshing from Distene.
• The Barcelona Supercomputing Center published some data related to language use and parallelization.
  • Apps are programmed mostly in Fortran (37%) and C++ (23%).
  • Parallelization is achieved using MPI (39%) and OpenMP (12%).
• Pointfuse converts point clouds to vector models.
• GridPro Version 6.6 was released with new advanced surface meshing and other improvements.
• frentos 0.1.5 is a Python interface to the CGAL mesh generation libraries.

From Pointwise

• Pointwise is heavily committed to the 1st AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop, to be held the weekend prior to AIAA Aviation in Denver in early June. The workshop involves meshing the NASA High Lift CRM aircraft (one of the benchmark cases for the co-located 3rd AIAA CFD High Lift Prediction Workshop) and sharing the results – not just the meshes, but the level of effort and challenges faced in their generation. Abstracts are due today [but I know a guy so you might be able to send yours next week.]

We had a lot of fun making this movie-inspired poster out of the contest meshes for last year’s International Meshing Roundtable. So much so that we’ve put images of it on our website for your use as desktop wallpaper.

News

• Flow Science launched two new user communities on LinkedIn:
  • FLOW-3D
  • FLOW-3D Cast
• SimScale blogs about CAE democratization and call price decreases and lowered learning curves the key enablers.

Meshes Built Upon Sand

Artist Jim Denevan‘s medium is sand. To be more specific, beach sand. And on the beach he executes his ephemeral, geometric, line art. When first seen on Colossal, I knew the following analogy had to be made. Now stay with me. His works (especially the more mesh-like ones like the screen capture below) are very much like meshes in that they are built upon unfirm ground (sloppy CAD), can be huge, take a lot of effort to make (more than we would like), and are erased and forgotten as soon as the fluids arrive. That’s not too much of a stretch, is it?

Screen capture from a video profile of artist Jim Denevan and his beach art. See links above.

I had an interesting conversation this morning with a co-worker about my wall of “mesh art” and the role of “craft” or “level of difficulty in execution” in deciding what was good. For example, the center piece (graphic on ceramic) was deemed “not good” because we can easily make a better airfoil mesh in Pointwise. (It caught my eye in the gallery because it reminded me of airfoils.) My counter argument to the “difficulty of execution” statement is that photography should be then relegated to lower status than a child’s crayon art because how difficult is it to point a camera and click one button. (Comedian Louis C.K. does a very funny bit on his young daughter’s drawings which is devilishly funny.)

Reading & Events

• Cambashi and intrinSIM have worked together for market research in the form of the Cambashi CAE Observatory with information on 470 non-EDA firms. They place the worldwide market for simulation software at nearly $5.4 billion.
• I haven’t yet had a chance to watch the recording of Chad Jackson’s webinar on The Five Trends Shaping Modern Engineering (hosted by Autodesk) but I recommend you do. [And then tell me about it. Like what exactly is “the visibility mandate?”]
• Mentor Graphics’ blog post Doing What You Can’t (see image below) reminds me of a saying we have at Pointwise. “It takes us time to do really difficult things. The impossible takes only slightly longer.”
• The ASSESS Congress 2017 (Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Strategies), an invitation-only event, will be held in the Washington DC area on 1-3 November.
• Finally, an infographic I like. The history of CFD, CAD, etc.

Bovine CFD. Image from Mentor Graphics. See link above.

The Cloud

• At COFES last week I saw Business Advantage present the results of their survey on “CAD in the cloud.” There’s a lot of data, but the information that caught my eye was one-third of respondents foresee no benefit from cloud-based CAD. Read more in WorldCAD Access’ summary of the presentation.
• Here’s another look at the Business Advantage survey results from Beyond PLM.
• SimScale touts the advantages of cloud-based CFD in their article 5 Reasons to Optimize Your Designs Through CFD Online. [Note: They are not referring to this CFD Online.]
  • Reduced start-up costs.
  • Availability that matches your needs.
  • Just as powerful as desktop-based CFD.
  • Everyone is always using the most up-to-date version of the software.
  • Your data is secure.
• Consumers expect cloud-based tools to be easier to deploy [sadly, no argument from me] and easier to use [that’s debatable; it shouldn’t necessarily be so]. Digital Engineering delves into the details of simulation that’s Preconfigured for HPC.
• Not cloud: future tech for HPC.
• Not simulation in cloud, simulation in CAD.

MSC has integrated Actran and SC/Tetra for aeroacoustic simulations.

Software

• SimScale shared their 2017 Q1 platform updates including a mesh quality report.
• The OpenFOAM Foundation reached their €100,000 fund-raising goal for 2017.
• Envenio’s EXN/AERO was updated including improved CGNS support.
• Modelon (model-based systems engineering) and Exa (CFD) are partnering.
• CoolSim for data center CFD is now available as an AutoCAD add-in.

Applications

Must-see simulation of the week: STAR-CCM+ looks at the Titanic. Image from Siemens.

• In the world of endurance racing, Williams Advanced Engineering will work with Ginetta on their LMP1 car including CFD. [Let’s have a little fun with this quote from the article: “CFD, computational fluid dynamics, is much more sophisticated than a wind tunnel.”]
• Solidworks’ CFD is being used to improve the performance of water treatment plants.
• Solidworks’ CFD for thermal is as easy to use as FEA, they say.

At Pointwise

• On 25 April, join us for a webinar with our friends from CRAFT Tech on using CFD to optimize surfboards.
• Come interact with us at AIAA Aviation in Denver on 3-9 June. We’ll be in the exposition hall in booth 301, we’re presenting two papers, and we’ll be heavily involved in the 1st AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop.
• Have fun with some mesh-based wallpapers for your computer’s desktop.

Beyond the Grid

My tastes in art extend beyond abstraction into animation and when it comes to the latter I have a special love for works done in black and white. Add a grid like Johan Rijpma has done in his animation Extrapolate and I’m all in.

As first seen on Cartoon Brew, the CFDer in me sees Extrapolate as a cautionary tale about the dangers of pushing CFD beyond the boundaries where it’s well suited. At the same time, the video shows that everything starts and ends with the grid and all complexity in the drawing (the CFD solution) flows from the grid and extends down to a single grid point.

Read about how the drawings were made on the artist’s website.

Screen capture of the video Extrapolate by Johan Rijpma.

Happy Easter to all of you who are so inclined.

Cloud

• CONSELF Cloud Simulation v2.9 was released with improvements in hex meshing, modal displacement calculations, and more.
• ENGINEERING.com wrote a bit about Envenio’s cloud-based delivery of EXN/Aero and Pointwise.
• CCTech developed their simulationHub cloud-based CFD platform using Autodesk’s Forge API.

Not Cloud

• T-Splines’ founder has evolved his Isogeometrix company into Coreform at which isogeometric analysis software for FEA will be developed.
• SpaceX is developing their own (currently unnamed) CFD solver for rockets.
• CRAFT Tech released CRUNCH CFD Version 3.2 with new turbulence and roughness models and more.
• Here’s a nice intro video to CFD simulation (FloEFD) in Solid Edge.

Not strictly CFD (although I’m willing to bet CFD was and will be involved), but DARPA selected Boeing’s design for their Experimental Spaceplane project. Image from DARPA.

Meshing, Viz, Computing – Oh My

• SimScale answers the question “What is a mesh?“
• Visualizing Data published their best of the visualization web for March 2017.
• This is interesting. Current petascale computers have a “mean time between failure” of about 8 hours and extrapolating that to exascale yields a MTBF of minutes. Therefore, your CFD solver had better be fault tolerant which is exactly what the ExaFLOW project is working on.

Events

• You have until June 2nd to submit an abstract for TFAWS, the Fluids and Thermal Analysis Workshop.
• The 33rd International CAE Conference and Expo will be held 6-7 November in Vicenza, Italy.
• The 2nd International Conference on CFD in Research and Industry will be held on 3-4 August 2017 in Songkhla, Thailand.

Applications

Was it trickery? How aerodynamics contributed to the attempt to break the 2-hour marathon time. Image from Siemens PLM. See link below to full article.

• In what might be one of the most widely read articles involving a CFD application, the folks at Siemens PLM (nee CD-adapco) did a CFD analysis with STAR-CCM+ of the recent attempt that just missed breaking the marathon 2-hour time. See image above.
• Monica Schnitger thinks it’s gonna be a good year for CAE. But also wishes vendors would report number of licenses sold in addition to revenue in order to get a better feel for the nascent and uneven transition to subscriptions.
• Digital Engineering wrote an in-depth article on the use of CAE for the America’s Cup.

Convergent Science shares applications of CONVERGE CFD to gas turbine type flowfields.  This image of a DLR combustor is from convergecfd.com where you can read the full article.

Jobs

• Flow Science has several job openings including CFD Engineer and Sales Engineer.
• The Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology has an open PhD position in CFD as applied to biomass.
• Applied CCM seeks a CFD Modeller.

Is a Mesh Really There if Nothing’s On It?

Edoardo Tresoldi was included in Forbes’ list of 30 influential European artists under the age of 30 and his installations created from wire mesh at architectural scale make it easy to see why.

As originally seen by me on Colossal, Tresoldi’s work is a paradoxical combination of geometry and formlessness, heft and ephemerality. From his biography, his use of mesh “transcends space time dimension and narrates a dialog between Art and World” which reveals itself in “the fade-out of physical limitations.” His work Lift (shown lit and viewed from below in the following image) really caught my eye.

Do not missed Tresoldi’s website where many of his mesh works are revealed.

Edoardo Tresoldi, Lift (a temporary installation in Huntington, UK). See link above.

Bonus: How Women Mentors Make a Difference in Engineering, from The Atlantic.

Just Silly: Structured water? You mean I’ve been drinking unstructured water all this time?

P.S. There won’t be a This Week in CFD next Friday as I’ll be on my way to Denver to participate in the AIAA 1st Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop being held the weekend prior to the AIAA Aviation Forum and Expo. There’s still time to register and attend for what’s certain to be more geometry modeling and meshing discussion you’ve ever had on a weekend.

News and Jobs

• Today is International Women in Engineering Day. How about using the hashtag #INWED17 on Twitter to tell everyone about the women engineers in your organization?
• Altair wants to hire a solver development engineer.
• Areva, based in Washington state, seeks to hire a Thermal-Hydraulics CFD Engineer.
• NASA has an internship opening for adjoint methods for CFD analysis and design.
• DLR, Aibrus, and ONERA have entered into a partnership to develop a next-generation CFD solver.  [Is this like CREATE here in the U.S?]
• Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand it’s cancelled. NASA’s challenge to improve the performance of FUN3D CFD has been terminated. They received over 1,800 applications and realized the vetting requirements for the FUN3D software would be impractical to implement. [Trying hard not to judge.]

Totally cool video from ONERA with a CFD simulation of a WWII-era Dewoitine 551 aircraft on a structured multi-block grid.

Applications

• Viking Pumps uses CFD to optimize their fluid handling equipment.
• CAESES has launched an online geometry tool so you can generate geometries for the MVRC challenge (design an Le Mans prototype car and simulate its performance using CFD). See image below. [Not being a car guy, I had to google the acronym LMP. My ignorance aside, I’d like to hear back from other folks who use this tool.]
• Also, the call for presentations is now open for the CAESES Users’ Meeting (27-29 Sep 2017).
• Engineering.com shares work done by Mentor Graphics to do a system-level CFD analysis using mixed 1-D and 3-D CFD simulations. (Interoperability of multi-dimensional modeling is one of the challenges cited by the ASSESS Initiative.)
• How about Diabatix’s browser-based CFD modeling of liquid cooling? In which we read, “The automation of engineering tools has generally not kept up with designers’ needs.”

Screen shot of the CAESES geometry tool for the MVRC challenge. Image from CAESES. See link above.

• As reported in Scientific American, CFD is being used to gain insight into how how 600 million year old organisms lived by reverse engineering them from their fossils. [I would’ve paid money for a CFD image in this article.]
• Uncertain quantification of a CFD simulation of turbulent jets, thesis work at Northern Arizona with contributions from FieldView. (UQ is one of the topics cited in the NASA CFD Vision 2030 Study.)
• Volvo won an award for a new piston that was designed with the aid of CFD.
• Simulation was used to make better puffed rice.
• How about using CFD for “anti-soiling“? [Not what I originally thought. PowerFLOW is being used to simulate the accumulation of dirt etc. on a car’s exterior to understand better how to keep external cameras and sensors clean and clear.]
• And architects can use CFD (in the cloud or otherwise) to better understand how wind flows around their buildings, especially in an urban environment.

News & Events

I just like this award-winning photo of graphene powder mixing in alcohol. Read about it at FYFD.

• Envenio has received an investment of $1.3 million. [Full disclosure: Envenio offers a cloud-based version of Pointwise to their customers for CFD mesh generation.]
• The DoE awarded NVIDIA funding from the Exascale Computing Project to develop a next-generation supercomputer. (Exascale computing platforms are part of the NASA CFD Vision 2030 Study.)
• Registration is now open for TFAWS, the Thermal & Fluids Analysis Workshop.
• The 40th International Conference on Software Engineering is next year in Gothenburg.

Software

• [New to me:] HORSES2D, a high-order, 2D, DG, spectral element, Navier-Stokes solver.
• Coming in STAR-CCM+ v12.04, discrete element modeling of particles with polyhedral shapes.
• ParaView 5.4.0 was released.
• SimVascular claims to be “the only fully opensource software package providing a complete pipeline from medical image data segmentation to patient specific blood flow simulation and analysis.”
• Six mistakes you should never make when generating your CFD grids (from Abdullah Karimi). #1 “Never use first iteration of automatically-generated mesh.” [If true, what’s implied about the current state of automatic meshing?]
• Let the debate begin/continue: is proprietary or open-source software better for users? Asked by our friends at Simscale. [My answer: it depends. My other answer: it’s not a religion.]
• Envenio has published the EXN/Aero Theory Manual.

Visualization

• Anyone thing that bivariate choropleth maps (as described by Visualizing Data) could be of benefit to visualizing CFD results?
• The annual Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards – celebrating information design – is now open for entries.

City of the Mesh

Alert reader Mike shared with me the following photograph he took of Gemma Danielle’s mural City of the Sun (2015). He and I were both in Denver recently for AIAA Aviation and we both apparently were on the Cherry Creek Trail but he saw it and I missed it.

You can read here where the artist says “This mural looks very fluid and full of motion, but actually it’s made up of thousands of straight lines.”

She can’t be any clearer; it is a CFD mesh.

Gemma Danielle, City of the Sun, 2015. Photo credit.

These Headings

• Lifecycle Insights is collecting data via their 2017 Simulation Study Survey which is said to take only 10 minutes. Why not spend a little time, have your voice heard, and receive the final survey results?
• On a related note, ENGINEERING.com is studying how engineers stay informed. [By reading This Week in CFD, of course.] The survey comes with a pretty nice preamble for what they’re looking for. Please help them out.
• DCS Computing has an immediate opening for a model & software developer for their open-source CFDEM software.
• The video of SIGGRAPH’s Real-Time Live demos includes several fluids-based animations that make me [you?] wonder, “How’d they do that?”
• On a related note, RealFlow’s Cinema 4D 2.0 was released and it too includes some cool-looking fluids capabilities.
• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for June 2017.

You know why I’m posting this photo of a PNY PREVAILPRO mobile workstation based on NVIDIA GPUs. Image from DEVELOP3D.

Have Little Relation

• On 22 August, join Pointwise in College Park, Maryland for a workshop on the latest capabilities and techniques in our meshing software. This workshop, Efficient Meshing with Pointwise, is a great opportunity for everyone in the Washington, DC area who’s interested in meshing to see what we’re up to. The workshop is free, but registration is required.
• The 2nd International Conference on Simulation Technology will be held 26-28 March 2018 in Stuttgart.
• The preliminary agenda for the CAESES European Users’ Meeting has been announced.
• The XFlow 2nd User Conference [A conference solely for their second user? I jest.] will be held 2-3 October in Madrid.
• When using subdivision surfaces in SolidWorks Industrial Design, how do you know when to use a globe versus a quadball? [At this point, I don’t grok sub-D surfaces and I’m too afraid to ask.]

SimScale shared this CFD simulation of wind loading of a tank farm.

To The Content

• Our friends at ANSYS continue to earn revenue at a nice pace with $264 million in Q2, an increase of 7% (as reported by Monica Schnitger). Read more in this article from TenLinks.
• Speaking of ANSYS, DEVELOP3D presents a detailed look at ANSYS Mechanical R18 with a promise to do the same for their CFD products next month.
• According to motorsport.com, the new IndyCar aerokit (designed with the aid of CFD) performs well. On a related note, NASCAR needs more CFD to understand proposed changes to their aerokits.
• SimScale explains verification and validation. [My summary: Verification tests whether your software is correctly solving your mathematical model. Validation tests how accurately your software’s results match reality.]

They Precede

• The OpenGL 4.6 specification has been published “including the capability to ingest SPIR-V shaders.” [I’d be much obliged if someone could explain the quoted text to me. My next goal is to use the word “ingest” in one of our product announcements.]
• Beta CAE released v18.0.0 of their software suite.
• What’s new in FloTHERM via ENGINEERING.com.
• Autodesk promotes their mesh automation in a video titled Never Run a CFD Mesh Sensitivity Study Again. Registration is required to view the video.
• FEAforAll opens the proverbial Pandora’s box by answering the question Which CAD format is best for CAE? [Short answer: the one your software imports most accurately. I’m not being flippant. There is no “best” format; they’re all equivalent.]

Voronoi in the Park

I should stop being surprised when tessellations manifest themselves IRL (in real life for the non-l33t). Rod Bogart created a Voronoi diagram of people enjoying the sunshine in a park.  I first saw this posted to kottke.org where this diagram was said to illustrate the parkgoers’ personal spaces.

Voronoi diagram of people in a park. Image by Rod Bogart, first seen on Kottke.org. See links above.