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.
