This Week in CFD

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.