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.
