Pointwise User Group Meeting 2013

Pointwise announced that our Pointwise User Group Meeting 2013 will be held in Fort Worth, Texas on 19-20 March. The first day of the event will be dedicated to in-depth, hands-on training with the latest release of the Pointwise CFD mesh generation software. The second day will feature technical presentations on CFD and meshing technology and applications from Pointwise, our partners, and our customers.

Mark your calendars. We hope to see you in Fort Worth next spring. For more details about the Pointwise User Group Meeting check out www.pointwise.com/ugm.

CFD in the Olympics

Kynan Maley, a CD-adapco engineer, will compete in the 2012 Olympics in London. photo from CD-adapco

If you’re tired of reading about how CFD was applied to swimsuits, bicycles, shot puts and other sporting paraphernalia you’ll enjoy this story about a real live CFDer who’ll be competing in London.

Kynan Maley is an engineer for CD-adapco whose day job is to support and train STAR-CCM+ users in Southeast Asia and Australia. When not doing CFD he is a kayaker who earned a spot to compete at the London 2012 Olympics in the Men’s Canoe Single (C1) and Men’s Canoe Double (C2) events.

Kynan has and is using a variety of CFD tools to refine his canoe including adding fins, performing a CFD simulation using STAR-CCM+, and plans to use overset meshing to include the paddle.

We wish him the best of luck. If I’m reading the TV schedule correctly, the C1 final will be Tue 31 Jul at 9:00 am (Texas time) and the C2 final will be Thu 2 Aug at 9:15 a.m. (Texas time).

Cubit – New Version, New Name

csimsoft has released Cubit 13.2, the latest version of their CAE preprocessor. Also, they plan to announce a new name for the product later today, 27 July 2012.

• Cubit web page [The link to the news release about what's new in 13.2 is broken otherwise I'd cite that.]
• [When the name changed is announced I'll update this page.]

News Bullets

• BladeDesigner is a CAE tool for turbomachinery blade design that’s available for free on SourceForge.
• The CIMdata white paper on “CFD for Mechanical Design Engineers – A Paradigm Shift for Better Design” is available for free from Mentor Graphics (registration required).
• coolingZONE, a community for electronics cooling practitioners, will hold their coolingZONE-12 International Conference and Exhibition in Cambridge, MA on 27-30 Aug 2012.
• NAFEMS is offering a Practical Introduction to CFD, a four-week online short course, from 28 Aug to 12 Sep. No software is required and homework is voluntary.
• JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, has analyzed a complete rocket engine using CFD with the ambitious goal of reducing design time and cost by 50% and while increasing thrust by 25%. Read more about this analysis including the role played by Intelligent Light’s FieldView at the link (email address required).
• Part 3 of the 5-part video series Pioneering Large Eddy Simulation with Prof. Parviz Moin is now online. Here are links to the first three parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
• Ford is applying CFD (“high-tech CFD”) to its 2013 NASCAR Sprint Cup car. [Good thing they're not using "low-tech CFD."]

CFD solution for the Ford Fusion. Photo from MotorAuthority.com.

Decorating with Grids

A video game store in Paris has a unique floor covering that only a mesh generator would love.

Image from MAKE:

The picture above reminded me of one I saw a couple years ago, an art installation by Heike Weber. I’m tempted to have my office repainted.

Image from heikeweber.net.

STAR-CCM+ Battery Simulation

Electrochemical simulation of lithium-ion batteries. Image from CD-adapco.

CD-adapco announced the release of simulation software for spirally-wound lithium-ion batteries. The technology was developed under a contract awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy and is available for production use as the STAR-CCM+ Battery Simulation Module.

The overall goal of the DoE project is to assist industry in developing better power sources for electric drive vehicles.

• CD-adapco’s announcement

News in Brief

• CFD consulting firm Informative Design Partners was acquired by RAND Worldwide, a professional services firm. Details of the deal were not provide. IDP writes about CFD on their CFD Analysis Blog.
• The Schnitger Corp. blog goes into a bit more detail about ANSYS’ 2012 Q2 performance. ANSYS continues to look for companies to acquire but due to a lack of candidates in the $200-$300 million range they’re focusing on smaller “tech tuck-ins.” Also of note is the fact that ANSYS is growing their large customer portfolio faster than their small customer portfolio.
• Tecplot Chorus is a finalist for Tech Innovation of the Year. The winners of this Stevie Award will be presented in San Francisco on 17 September. You can vote for Tecplot Chorus here. Tecplot was also included in Seattle Magazine’s list of The 100 Best Companies to Work For.
• CEI announced the release of EnSight 10.0.2e.

Applications

COMSOL provides this animation of flow over a tractor trailer traveling at 80 km/hr. Colors represent the log of turbulence intensity.

• Autodesk Simulation TV has a video about Simplifying Revit Components for CFD.
• NVIDIA posted a video showing interactive CFD using FluidDyna. The simulation was run on an NVIDIA Maximus workstation, the second generation of which they announced at SIGGRAPH.
• Symscape offers this video and brief tutorial on simulating a tank being filled with water.

WebGL-Based Fluid Particle Simulation

This should keep you busy for hours. (At least it did for me.) It’s an interactive fluid simulation that runs in your web browser using WebGL. Just use your cursor to stir things up.

CFD Applications

Visualization of a CFD simulation of Ramgen’s shock wave-based compression technique. Image from phys.org.

• Ramgen is developing technology involving shock wave-based compression of CO2 gas as part of a Dept. of Energy program for carbon capture and sequestration. (See image above.) The CFD simulations, using Numeca’s CFD code and the DOE’s supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Lab, have cut potentially 2 years and $2 million from commercialization of the product.
• Watch this video demonstration of Khamsin, the CFD-plugin for Sketchup, as it is used to model a 250 cc go-cart.
• At the University of Colorado, Boulder they’re using Tecplot Chorus to data-mine CFD solutions to address the issue of uncertainty in hypersonic air vehicle design.
• Embry-Riddle is using STAR-CCM+ to simulate the aerodynamics of their EcoCar2 design.

CFD solution of the EcoCar traveling at 50 mph. Colors indicate pressure. Image from Desktop Engineering.

CFD News in Brief

• Visualization Sciences Group, makers of the Avizo software for visualizing scientific data including CFD, was acquired by FEI Company, a world leader in production and distribution of electron microscopes. Plans for support and future development of VSG’s products is said to be unchanged. VSG had also recently announced the acquisition of the amira 3D visualization software.
• Here are brief highlights about CFD in India.
• ANSYS launched ANSYS Academic Student, allowing students to use their software outside of the classroom for only $25.
• Creaform, purveyors of portable 3D measurement technology, have added CFD analysis to their consultancy offerings.
• CD-adapco announced the availability in Japan of es-ice, their internal combustion engine simulation tool.

CFD Resources & Jobs

• Prof. Lorena Barba from Boston University, notable for making her CFD course lectures available on YouTube, also posts various CFD-related documents on figshare.
• Users of OpenVSP, NASA’s open-source, parametric, aircraft geometry modeling tool, can now benefit from the VSP Hangar, a community-driven collection of geometry models.
• ETH Zurich seeks a research assistant to conduct CFD simulations of the lacuno-canalicular network of bone tissue.
• Dell’s high performance computing blog has posted the first of a promised series of articles in a CFD Primer.

CFD Events

• Registration is now open for the 9th International Conference on CFD in the Minerals and Process Industries to be held 10-12 December 2012 in Melbourne, Australia.
• ESI announced a CFD open house in Essen, Germany on 19 September 2012.

Immersed Boundary Methods Take It On The Chin

The DEVELOP3D blog has an interesting “punch and counterpunch” exchange between KARALIT, makers of the KARALIT CFD software which features the immersed boundary (IB) approach, and established CFD vendors ANSYS and CD-adapco.

KARALIT CFD solution for ASMO car body. Image from DEVELOP3D.

You might first want to read this DEVELOP3D article about KARALIT from July 2012. The gist of the article is that KARALIT is confident that their software will “simplify CFD preprocessing and speed generation of accurate results.” Their website [like most websites] is a bit more enthusiastic. It says “Direct CFD Has Arrived” [perhaps taking a page from SpaceClaim's marketing about direct CAD], “No Mesh CFD”, and “KARALIT Revolution.”

Yesterday, DEVELOP3D posted counter-punches from ANSYS and CD-adapco.

ANSYS begins by throwing a right cross at KARALIT by pointing out the IB method truly isn’t meshless, it’s inaccurate for wall-bounded flows, application of physical models becomes complicated, it’s not mature, and the immersed layer approach to resolving the boundary layer creates a new overset mesh problem when interfacing with the background Cartesian grid. The good news for us meshing folks is that ANSYS is optimistic that advances in meshing technology will eventually challenge the meshing times of the IB approach.

CD-adapco follows with a left uppercut. “Sometimes, fashions lose favour for good reasons.” They also raise the accuracy issue and point out that any gains in speed are more than offset by decreases in accuracy and cite their own experience with trimmed cell meshing.

KARALIT absorbs these blows and responds with one of their own. Has nothing changed in CFD over the past 3 decades? [Interestingly, Tony Jameson's paper at the recent Future Directions of CFD in Research Conference makes the claim that CFD has plateaued for the past 15 years.] They also then respond with Aesop’s fable about the fox and the sour grapes [which unfortunately I can't tie into my boxing analogy] and claim that ANSYS and CD-adapco are just calling IB a sour grape simply because they cannot reach it.

This reminds me of the hue and cry over Exa’s Lattice Boltzman method when it first appeared on the scene in the late 1990s. And they just went public. So I’ll have to agree with the KARALIT folks when they say “let the users judge whether the grapes are sweet or sour.” I suspect ANSYS and CD-adapco would phrase that as caveat emptor. But that’s a good thing – let the software stand on its technical merits.

• DEVELOP3D’s July 2012 article introducing KARALIT CFD
• DEVELOP3D’s responses from ANSYS and CD-adapco
• KARALIT’s website

New Releases

• There’s a new release of Paneling Tools for Rhino. (These tools let you generate “cellular patterns” and populate them over a rectangular grid.)
• The latest issue of CD-adapco’s STAR Academics Newsletter is out including details on how students can get STAR-CCM+ at no cost, an announcement of their academic paper contest, and articles about student use of the software.
• TFT Labs announced the availability of TFT4iT, a web-based application for working with 3D geometry.
• TYCHO Version 1.0 is now available. The software is a freely available, compressible hydrodynamics solver.
• Dassault Systemes released DraftSight V1R3, free* software for viewing and editing DWG files. [I have no idea what the asterisk after "free" implies. That's how they have it on their web page and I couldn't find an explanation.]
• Robert McNeel & Associates released openNURBS 5, the latest version of their free toolkit for accurate 3D geometry interoperability.
• Results comparison in SolidWorks Flow Simulation 2013.

Events

• ASME announced a course on CFD Fundamentals and Applications using ANSYS’ CFD software. The course will be held on Saturday 03 November in Santa Clara, CA and online.
• The CFD seminar schedule from the National Institute of Aerospace is available online.
• The NAFEMS World Congress (9-12 June 2013, Salzburg, Austria) will also host the 1st International Conference on Simulation Process and Data Management. Abstract are being accepted with a deadline of 5 November.
• The preliminary agenda for the Open Source CFD International Conference (29-30 October 2012, London) is now available. [Pointwise is a sponsor of this event.]

SpaceClaim – For When CAD is a Necessary Evil

There’s been a lot of buzz about the recent release of SpaceClaim 2012+, billed as the CAD software for people who need to use CAD but don’t want to be CAD experts. One obvious field where that might be true is CFD – we all need a geometry definition of the widget being simulated but few of us want to or can become a CAD expert. CAD is relegated to the role of a necessary evil. One can make the same comment about mesh generation.

The folks at SpaceClaim are quoted as saying they want to make solid modeling as easy to use as PowerPoint. [Given PowerPoint's notorious reputation as famously exemplified by Edward Tufte perhaps a better analogy could've been made but I get the point.]

Further insight into SpaceClaim’s world view is available as an interview with co-founder Blake Courter on the Deelip.com blog. One bullet point on one slide summed it up for me: “CAD vendors float a self-serving worldview that demonstrates a lack of customer understanding.”

Mesh remodeling in SpaceClaim 2012+ (screen grab from video)

As far as features go, SpaceClaim 2012+ seems to have many new capabilities for CAM including interfaces to Mastercam and Esprit. Of special interest to me is their expanded suite of tools for working with faceted geometry (what they call mesh and STL data). It’s worth watching their video about mesh remodeling. There are core modeling improvements, Windows 8 compatibility, and other new features.

If anyone is using SpaceClaim for preparing geometry for CFD I’d like to hear about your experiences. Just comment on this post.

• SpaceClaim’s announcement of 2012+
• SpaceClaim’s What’s New page for 2012+
• SpaceClaim’s video about mesh remodeling
• Cadalyst’s article about 2012+
• Deelip.com’s interview

Applications

• CFD in the cloud keeps Trek bicycles racing on the ground.
• Wartsila [umlauts omitted] used CFD to optimize the hull of their new tanker design.
• CFD for uroflowmetry [I can't wait to see the video about this on F%^$ Yeah Fluid Dynamics.]

Share Your CFD News

I’m always interested in learning more about CFD software, applications, people – just about anything. If you have some CFD news you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to email it to blog@pointwise.com.

News Nuggets

• As first reported by Ray Kurland, five of the original founders of SolidWorks got the CAD world all drooly this week when they announced their new company, Belmont Technology (very likely a name that will change as they get closer to launch). As for a product (they haven’t written a line of code yet), think in terms of tools for designers and engineers (see post on CAD Insider). [I'm willing to bet somewhere along the line someone used the term "cloud."]
• CD-adapco is looking to hire an Infrastructure/Architecture Developer.
• Intelligent Light is hosting a webinar titled Break Through CFD Bottlenecks with Engineered Workflows on the use of FieldView to improve your postprocessing of large numbers of CFD solutions. The webinar will be held on two days: 29 Nov and 06 Dec.
• Flow Science has won consecutive Intel Cluster Ready Voyager Awards, the most recent awarded at SC12, the supercomputing conference. The award recognizes their work on making FLOW-3D available on Intel’s cluster computers.
• A tweet by @FloRobin4CFD from the IDAJ CAE Solution Conference indicated that IDAJ was winding down their STAR-CD and STAR-CCM+ business and ramping up customized OpenFOAM solutions.
• Leap Australia offers 10 tips for multiphase flow CFD models.

Multiphase CFD solution from Leap Australia

Applications

• Team Rapid Motion from Germany and Australia finished 4th in the F1 in Schools World Finals 2012 based, in part, on a 16% average speed gain through the use of Caedium CFD.
• What do a bird’s wings and an airplane propeller have in common? Prof. Lorena Barba explains in this video from TED-Ed.
• The CAE Experiment [didn't it used to be The CFD Experiment?] is seeking participants for round 2 of their investigation of HPC in the cloud.
• CFD of the thin film flow in a journal bearing by COMSOL.
• In advance of the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas the University of Texas offers up this article on CFD for F1 racing.

CFD for Formula 1. Image from the Univ. of Texas.

New Releases

• Software Cradle announced the release of SC/Tetra V10 including improvements in turbulence modeling, free surface modeling, radiation, and cavitation.
• ANSYS released ANSYS 14.5 including multi-physics and surface meshing improvements.
• CD-adapco announced STAR-CCM+ v7.06 including convergence speedups, new droplet and boiling models, and icing capabilities.

Events

• The abstract deadline for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2013 has been extended until 15 December.
• The 19th International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (IMACS) World Congress will be held 26-30 August 2013 at the Real Centro Universitario Escorial Maria Cristina near Madrid, Spain. The Call for Papers will open on 01 December 2012.
• The 7th International Conference on Fluid Structure Interaction will be held 10-12 April 2013 in Gran Canaria, Spain.
• Abstracts for the MSC Software 2013 Users Conference, to be held 7-8 May 2013 in Irvine, Califorinia, are due 31 January.
• CFD papers from COMSOL‘s 2010 and 2011 conferences are available on their website for your perusal.
• ANSYS blogged a summary of the recent 2012 Automotive Simulation Conference. They have also made available some of the technical papers from previous automotive conferences. [ANSYS will be participating in the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2013.]

Real Time Flow Visualization

Artist Charles Sowers created Windswept (2011), an installation of 612 velocity vectors that freely rotate according to the interaction of the wind with the building. Be sure to watch the video and explore his other fluid-related works. [As first seen on F%^$ Yeah Fluid Dynamics.]

Windswept (2011) by Charles Sowers

News in Brief, Part Un

Battery simulation in STAR-CCM+. Image from EHVT magazine.

• CD-adapco’s work on battery modeling and simulation is showcased in Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Technology, a [maddeningly difficult to navigate] online magazine. The article begins on page 97.
• The National Institute of Aerospace has videos of their CFD lectures available online including their most recent (from 18 Dec 2012) on First, Second, and Third Order Finite-Volume Schemes for Diffusion.
• In advance of soliciting participants for round 2 of their experiment, the organizers of The Uber-Cloud Experiment (use of HPC resources in the cloud for CAE) [keeps changing names?] published a brief summary report about round 1, Half Time in the Uber-Cloud. To summarize the summary, 160 participants formed 20 teams to essentially put various CAE, HPC, and cloud technologies to use to “distinguish between hype and reality.” Reading between the lines, progress during round 1 was limited but virtually all participants wish to proceed with round 2 which promised to be more rigorously structured.
• Siemens PLM Software’s JT data format has been accepted as the first ISO standard (ISO IS14306) for lightweight 3D data exchange. [Is anyone in CFD using JT?]
• Autodesk’s Project Falcon, airflow simulator, is now available in Revit. [Be sure to watch the video.]
• Website for the 8th International OpenFOAM Workshop is now online. Abstracts for the event are due 15 March 2013.
• ESI-OpenCFD is hosting their first “official” OpenFOAM Conference on 24-26 April 2013 in Frankfurt.
• CD-adapco is seeking a Software Architect for their Bellevue, WA location.

CFD simulation of airflow around two buildings done with Project Falcon in Autodesk Revit.

Software Engineering in Academia

“The outlook for academic software engineering and other practical aspects of computer science therefore doesn’t look that good.”

Prof. Ian Sommerville wrote that, and other tantalizing nuggets, on his Geek Prof blog. I have an obvious interest in software engineering from the business side of things but I’m also following an on-again off-again conversation about whether engineering undergraduates (e.g. aerospace and mechanical engineers) need to learn programming as part of the curriculum.

Prof. Sommerville observes how software engineering in academia has changed over the course of his career. In the 1970s, universities were places with “liberal views, accommodated eccentricity, gave people time to think and to pursue their own interests.” Now he finds that universities are “more boring places that are driven by corporate goals and are much less welcoming to the eccentric scholars who published little but were stimulating conversationalists. Its all about outcomes, line managers and targets.”

What I find tantalizing is that I see both sides of Prof. Sommerville’s argument. Keeping in mind that I’ve never worked in academia (but have served for many years on a university advisory board) I think that tenure sounds like a pretty sweet deal for pursuing your own interests and honing your conversational skills. And I suppose that freedom comes at a price. On the other hand, universities (and a lot of U.S. government labs) have become very corporate with respect to research contracts and the licensing of research results.

It seems to be a matter of demarcation – where’s the dividing line between basic and applied research? And is that line even relevant? Should universities be confined to the basic research while leaving the applied work to industry? Certainly we’ve all seen examples of university research that’s nothing more than making a clone of some commercially available tool or system. [OK, maybe not a clone per se but simply a variation on a theme with incremental differentiations.] And wouldn’t companies be better off not having to dabble in basic research and instead be able to focus on the applied?

Or has all that protected witty banter in the faculty lounge led academia toward irrelevancy so that the only way to pay their salaries is for the administration to ride them hard for research contracts and intellectual property they can monetize? [This paragraph is designed solely to be provocative.]

And I’m not even certain that citing Google as a counter-example to academia is a good approach because, as far as software companies go, they’re way outside the norm. All that money lets them do all sorts of things the vast majority of software companies can’t afford. [The professor narrows the scope of his argument by saying that the only interesting software engineering problems anymore involve scale, something universities can't afford to explore, hence citing Google and Amazon as counter-examples.]

This a thought provoking, but not answer illuminating, article. What do you think?

News in Brief, Part Deux

• The HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference on “usage models and benefits, the future of supercomputing, latest technology developments, best practices and advanced HPC topics” will be held 7-8 February 2013 at Stanford University.
• With four semesters of work you can earn an International Master in Turbulence from three French universities working collaboratively.
• From the Software Carpentry blog comes Lorena Barba’s Reproducibility PI Manifesto.  I like these two:
  • #2 All our research code (and writing) is under version control.
  • #6 We will release code at the time of submission of a paper.
• Best of the visualization web for November 2012 from the Visualizing Data blog.
• From the FDS-SMV blog…
  • FDS 6 RC2 has been released to fix a few things in RC1 and to change how species are specified.
  • FDS is rigorously verified and validated and the developers seek V&V input from their user community.
• Optimal Solutions released Sculptor version 3.3 for geometry morphing and shape optimization.  In addition to restructuring the product offering new technical capabilities have been added for Fluent and WIND-US interfaces and response surfaces.

Holiday Goodies

To celebrate the holiday season (and Christmas if that’s your holiday of choice as it is mine), here’s a sleighful of fluid goodies.

Chemistry of Snowflakes

Cornstarch + water + speaker = Cornstarch Monster

Painting in Water

Taking the Expert out of CFD

Digital Manufacturing Report buried the essence of their article CFD for the Rest of Us in the very last paragraph where Intelligent Light’s Steve Legensky is quoted “[CFD] is no longer just an expert’s game.”

Velocity field around a racing bicycle with Zipp Firecrest 808 wheels. CFD solution by CD-adapco’s STAR-CCM+, visualization by Intelligent Light’s FieldView. Image from Digital Manufacturing Report.

Dell also misses the boat a little bit in their take on this article, HPC in the Cloud Can Bring CFD to the Masses. While cloud-based high performance computing certainly improves access to resources they walk a fine line in saying “the Cloud” makes CFD more accessible to organizations “not interested in investing in staff with CFD expertise.”

In case you missed the news, Intelligent Light was recognized at SC12, the supercomputing conference, with the HPC Innovation Excellence Award for their efforts on improving CFD workflow as proven by the direct benefits realized by Zipp Speed Weaponry, a manufacture of bicycle wheels. Zipp’s new product line has been so successful the company added 120 jobs.

Intelligent Light’s multi-year study of CFD workflow and the application of that study to their FieldView product showed how advances in automatic meshing, on-demand CFD solvers, and efficient, remote extraction of engineering results from big data files can deliver the engineering insights Zipp’s engineers needed while minimizing the overhead typically associated with CFD.

I’ll nitpick Dell’s headline by pointing out that the masses don’t need CFD. And DMR’s headline gives me too much of an Oliver Twist vibe. I’ve said before that CFD is about process not processors, a sentiment that Legensky expresses much better. CFD used to be like a computer from the 1950s, a huge contraption tended to by legions of dedicated followers. CFD needs to be like a [dare I say] iPad, that you just pick up and use reliably.

This topic is also covered by Concept to Reality magazine.

Caveat: You still must understand and appreciate fluid dynamics before using CFD in the same way that you must understand (and maybe fear) electricity before rewiring your breaker box.

Events

• The first Femap Symposium will be held 26-27 June 2013 in Cincinnati.
  • Related, watch this video about geometry and mesh associativity in Femap.
• The SIAM Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling will be held 11-14 November 2013 in Denver. The call for papers should be posted soon.
• CD-adapco announced the agenda for the STAR Global Conference.

News in Brief

• NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center is looking to hire an engineer to do CFD.
• FLOW-3D News for Winter 2013 is now available online.
• From TED-Ed, learn the difference between explicit and implicit numerical schemes from Lorena Barba.
• ANSYS and the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center have partnered to provide simulation software and HPC resources to academia.
• Compatibility and Accuracy of Mesh Generation in HyperMesh and CFD Simulation with AcuSolve for Torque Converter (PDF)
• Typing on a tablet can be done, but not well. Doing CAD work on a tablet is even more problematic. Enter Orange Juice Studios and their patent-pending OMouse which has the potential to make CAD drawing on tablets [and maybe mesh generation?] easier.

Meshing and Geometry

• The Roots of CAD, part 1 from 3D CAD World.
• Here’s a nice overview of CFD grid terminology from Innovative CFD.
• Remember the announcement of Geomagic Spark, their collaborative effort with SpaceClaim on Scan-CAD integration? DEVELOP3D writes about their beta test of Geomagic Spark.
• Read more about precise organic modeling in Dezignstuff’s article about Tsplines, mesh modeling and NURBs.
• Cheng, Dey, and Shewchuk wrote a new text about Delaunay Mesh Generation.

Have you purchased your copy of the new Delaunay Mesh Generation book by Cheng, Dey, and Shewchuk?

Wind Tunnel, Computer, Wind Tunnel

In the early, brash days of CFD it was going to replace the wind tunnel. [Depending on who you are, you are either making an embarrassed smile or a knowing chuckle right now.]

Turnabout is fair play. When you’ve got a souped-up computer (this one for cancer research) and a need for some serious cooling, why not build a wind tunnel around your computer?

Now, if you used that computer to do CFD on the flow through the wind tunnel and around your computer…

Mike Schropp’s wind tunnel cooled computer.

Visualization

This computational model of the heart was developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Image is a screen capture from a video on the Visual.ly blog.

• Visualization people take note: In an article on the Visual.ly blog about the beauty of scientific visualization we read yet again disparaging remarks about rainbow color maps. To quote in its entirety: “Sometimes, scientific visualization also uses rainbow color scales, or inappropriately uses 3D techniques. This still produces beautiful images, but the usefulness of these images can be harmed by these techniques [emphasis mine]. The people who do this kind of work are extremely intelligent, so you might ask, why are they doing something wrong? The nature of SciVis requires people who are experts at some extremely niche subjects, and they spend the majority of their time learning about and working on these problems, unaware that there are better techniques for showing their data.” In other words, we’re so busy doing science we should be forgiven for creating poor visualizations.
• The article linked to above also includes a nice [at least for me] taxonomy of visualization.
  • Information Visualization (InfoVis) – small datasets of demographic or financial information, for example
  • Visual Analytics – rapid and repeated visual queries of datasets
  • Scientific Visualization (SciVis) – large datasets with spatial and temporal components
• The NSF’s International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge promotes communication of “science, engineering and technology for education and journalistic purposes.” They are now accepting entries with a deadline of 30 Sep 2013.
• The Visualizing Data blog presents Best of the Visualization Web for January 2013.

CD-adapco in the News

Casting simulation from STAR-CCM+ v8. Image from CD-adapco.

• CD-adapco released STAR-CCM+ v8 [v8.02 to be precise]. Notable additions and improvements include an add-on for casting and foundry processes, parts-based meshing in which meshing parameters are associated with the geometric part, and JT Open integration for improved CAD interoperability.
• The February 2013 issue of CD-adapco’s STAR Academics Newsletter is available online.
• Boredom is not an option: Gene Kranz, well-known NASA flight director, will keynote the STAR Global Conference 2013. [I'd love hear his keynote address but the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2013 is scheduled for the same days. [Drat! Would anyone notice if I was missing?] I highly recommend Kranz’ book, Failure is Not an Option, which seems doubly fitting since I just watched the Falcon/Dragon launch this morning. If you like Kranz’ book you’ll also probably like Digital Apollo.]

Business

• Autodesk, the largest CAE company depending on how you look at it, has rebranded with a new logo.
• ANSYS continues to make a lot of money. 2012 Q4 revenue set a record for the company at $220 million. They’re expecting something in the $200 million range for 2013 Q1. Monica Schnitger provides an analysis of the numbers.

News in Brief

Polyhedral mesh for a backward facing step. From a Symscape comparison of poly, tet, and hex meshes.

• Symscape compared polyhedral (polyhedral mesh support is coming in Caedium v5), tetrahedral, and hexahedral meshes for computation of flow over a backward-facing step and concluded that polys: [polies?]
  • converge faster
  • converge better
  • run faster
• Dassault Systemes released SIMULIA V6R2013.

A Wave That Never Breaks

Artist Mario Ceroli sculpts these amazingly tactile breaking waves from glass and wood. Notice how the wave is created from hundreds of slices stacked side by side. [As first seen on Colossal.]

Marco Ceroli, Maestrale, 1992

CAE in the Cloud

A Design World article (CAE on the cloud) from last October has sparked a discussion on LinkedIn from which I infer that when engineers say “the cloud” they all mean different things.

What does the cloud look like to you? Image from http://apoemeachday.com/

Just like when you were a kid, lying on your back in a green field, looking up in the sky and trying to find shapes in the clouds (“That one’s a bunny. No, it’s a spaceship.”), it seem that we each see or want something different. [For the time being, let's not consider those who see a clear blue sky, violent storm clouds, or the conspiratorial chemtrails.]

Some assume cloud apps will be cheaper than traditional desktop CAE apps. Some see cost savings on the hardware side. Others see the cloud as a way to temporarily access computing resources to cover the infrequent large or short turnaround job. Some think the cloud will be best suited for the non-expert CAE user. [Please, no one say "democratization."]

Who and what do you think the cloud is for?

Software

• CD-adapco released STAR-CCM+ v8.02.
• TYCHO (open source CFD) announced tychoBCG3D, a tool for extracting boundary conditions from 3D scans or STL data.
• In a 4 minute video, Autodesk presents part 3 of What’s New in Autodesk Simulation 2014.
• CEI used EnSight to create a visualization of a FLOW-3D solution of a ship’s wake including bioluminescence.

Events

• Keynote speakers have been announced for this coming October’s Open Source CFD International Conference in Hamburg: Mr. Jon Gunner, technical director at Koenigsegg Automotive AB and Prof. Eric Paterson, head of the aerospace and ocean engineering at Virginia Tech University.
• MASCOT13, the 13th IMACS/ISGG Meeting on Applied Scientific Computing and Tools, will be held in conjunction with the 19th IMACS (International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation) World Congress. IMACS is being held on 26-3o August 2013 at Real Centro Universitario El Escorial-Maria Cristina. (Note: ISGG is the International Society of Grid Generation.) [The IMACS website is perhaps the worst conference website I have ever seen.]
• FLOW Science announced the speakers for their 13th FLOW-3D European Users Conference (13-14 June, Madrid).
• Abstract due date for Metacomp Technologies’ Symposium (17-19 September 2013, Universal City, California) is 01 August and the registration deadline is 23 August.
• The Femap Symposium 2013 (26-27 June, Cincinnati) announced their Image Showcase, a competition for cool Femap images with a grand prize of an AMD FirePro W7000 graphics card.
• The 1st Symposium on Dispersed Two-Phase Flows will be held 21-27 September 2013 in Rhodes, Greece.
• A little late on this, but Dr. Christopher Rumsey was awarded the AIAA Excellence in Standardization Award for his contributions to CGNS, the CFD data standard. Chris is also well known for his work on NASA’s CFL3D CFD code.
• To celebrate their participation in MSC Software’s 2013 User Conference, CEI is offering their customers a 70% discount on the registration fee for that event.

News

• The University of Texas at Austin was awarded $50 million over four years by the NSF and Stampede, a 500,000 processor supercomputer for scientific research.
• Someone’s looking to hire mesh generation software engineers in Austin, Seattle, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and New York.
• By acquiring FE-DESIGN (“the technology leader for non-parametric optimization solutions in both the structural and fluids-based domains”) Dassault Systemes claims their SIMULIA applications now provide the most complete design optimization solution on the market.
• ANSYS published a special issue of ANSYS Advantage for the oil and gas industry.
• Here’s an interesting article about geometry idealization, meshing, and FEA.

Faces in Liquid Metal

At first this may appear as an homage to the movie Terminator 2, but artist Johnson Tsang creates striking sculptures of pouring and splashing liquid metal with human faces in the streams of fluid.

Sculpture by Johnson Tsang. Image from This is Colossal.

NAFEMS Professional Simulation Engineer

NAFEMS launched their Professional Simulation Engineer (PSE) competency certification and tracking system at their recent NAFEMS World Congress in Salzburg. Their system of PSE competencies has been developed over the course of several years by their technical working groups and other experts as a means of assessing, maintaining, and developing the skills needed by those who utilize CAE tools.

Over 1,400 individual competencies are organized in 26 categories such as Fatigue, Dynamics and Vibration, and Electromagnetics. I see three categories that are relevant to CFD: Core CFD, Verification and Validation, and CAD-CAE Collaboration. The PSE system includes educational materials and resources. You must be a NAFEMS member to participate in the PSE program.

I have registered for the PSE Competency Tracker and in my infinite spare time will try – emphasize try – to experiment with the Core CFD topic. [Oops, first roadblock. I have to pass Fundamentals of Flow, Porous Media, and Heat Transfer first. I fear I will be proven incompetent.]

• NAFEMS PSE website

Applications

FYFD shares how flow viz isn’t limited to CFD with this photo of surface streaklines on the upper forebody of an F-18 at 26 degrees angle of attack.

• The airborne movement of particulates contributes to the fact that indoor air is less clean that outdoor air and that’s what’s being studied by researchers at Clarkson. [It's not clear whether CFD is involved in their computational work. But I'm uncomfortable with the mention of going shoeless in the house. I'm uncomfortable with going shoeless at all.]
• SolidWorks includes NAFEMS benchmarks to help users build confidence in their simulation results. [How long before something like this comes to CFD?]
• Autodesk CFD is applied to the design of heat exchangers in the oil and gas industry.
• Everyone loves free software and everyone hates dealing with CAD interoperability issues. Therefore, we should all check out the free software offerings from CCE Labs as first noticed via CAD Insider.
  • A CATIA V5 translator for SolidWorks
  • A CATIA V5 assembly viewer
  • Ensuite-Lite for “quick access to CAD data”
• Assessment of flow-induced vibration in radial gates during extreme flood [PDF]
• Even in FEA they urge you to check your mesh quality. [The author throws designers under the bus - "CAD designers who have a passion for the smallest details and a flagrant lack of knowledge about the FEA analysis requirements."]
• Australia’s DSTO recently purchased a supercomputer from Cray to perform CFD computations with hundreds of millions of cells for submarines.
• Here’s a video tutorial on using CEI’s EnSight with medical MRI data. (See also some slides explaining this “4D flow” visualization.)

People, Places, and News

• Paromita Mitra, an aerospace engineering undergrad at Mississippi State University, is competing in the Miss USA Pageant after being crowned Miss Mississippi.
• Intelligent Light’s Earl Duque is profiled in 5enses Magazine. [Earl is someone in the CFD business who's worth knowing and reading about.]
• FWIW, the global CFD market is expected to grow at 13.33% [to the hundredths of a percent!] from 2012 to 2016 [their dates should be as accurate - from May 14, 2012 to November 3, 2016 at 2:35 p.m. and not a minute later] according to Research & Markets.
• There’s a new weekly source for CFD news – the CFD Newspaper at www.cfdpaper.com (compiled using paper.li)
• Autodesk has also made available Cloud 101, a presentation on what the cloud is and why it will be important to you. [When you go to the link and read the misinformation that motivated them to write this "ebook" you'll know why I expected the fifth reason to be "78% of all statistics are made up." Also, it says the ebook is 10 pages - it's actually 8, not counting the cover.]

Events

Mach number distribution around an airfoil, computed with a high-order method. Image from DLR.

• Monica Schnitger provides a nice summary of the SIMULIA Community Conference. In it she cites the example of an automotive company who built a vertical app for side mirrors for use by their designers. The app uses iSight for geometry prep and STAR-CCM+ for everything else.
• Z.J. Wang summarizes the 2nd International Workshop on High-Order CFD Methods
  • Abstracts, summaries, and test cases are hosted by DLR.
  • The next workshop will be in January 2015 in conjunction with AIAA SciTech and every other year thereafter (time, not location).
  • 4-6 benchmark problems for the 2015 workshop will be defined within a couple of months.
  • The pacing item is generation of coarse, high-order meshes for realistic geometry. [The gauntlet has been laid down. Pointwise was called out. It is now up to us.]
• If you’ve ever attended the International Meshing Roundtable, they’re seeking nominations from you for IMR 2013 Fellow. They’re due 18 August.

Different Ways to Infinity

Different Ways to Infinity is a “science fiction artwork” that presents the results of an imaginary scientific laboratory in the form of images and videos. The video below and related pieces approach infinity through chaos. As first seen on the Triangulation Blog.

Different Ways to Infinity, Simulation #2. Click image for video.

FieldView 14 is Coming

Intelligent Light announced the availability of a sneak peak at FieldView 14, the upcoming release of their CFD postprocessing and visualization software.

Comparing multiple datasets in FieldView 14. Image from Intelligent Light.

This new version of the software includes new abilities for comparing multiple datasets, interactive visualization of millions of particles and much more.

• FieldView 14 sneak peak

Software

• Symscape released Caedium CFD v5.1 including the ability to create a helix on a cylinder or cone.
• Optimal Solutions released Sculptor v3.4 for mesh and geometry morphing. This latest release includes the ability to morph an existing geometry to a target shape.
• The RBF-Morph add-on for Fluent is now directly available from ANSYS.
• LS-DYNA R7 includes an incompressible, finite-element CFD solver and a conservation element/solution element solver for compressible flows.
• STAR-CCM+ v8.04 will include a discrete adjoint solver.

News in Brief

• The top 3 dream employers for engineering students are, in order, NASA, Google, and Boeing. See the other 97 in the list at the link.
• NASA Ames’ latest supercomputer, Endeavour, is an SGI UV-2000 shared-memory system with 1,536 cores and 6 TB of shared memory.
• Monica Schnitger looks at ESI’s first quarter results (up 2%) and sees a robust contribution from OpenCFD.
• Flow Science has issued the call for papers for the 2013 FLOW-3D World Users Conference to be held in Chicago this September. Abstracts are due 26 July 2013.
• DEVELOP3D makes the case that round 1 of the cloud software bout goes to the software companies, not the users.
• GrabCAD wrote a nice timeline of CAD hardware.
• Life Upfront interviewed the CEO of Intact Solutions (i.e. Scan and Solve) on many topics including “meshless FEA.” [The term meshless always gets my attention.] But it’s OK because he states categorically “Mesh is a good thing.”
• In what’s perhaps a bit of wishful thinking, Symscape wonders whether 3D printing is the killer app that will take simulation mainstream. [P.S. I hate the term "maker."]

Applications

Next time you’re at a party, look for Autodesk’s Project Falcon. At Design Night in San Francisco folks could mount the bike, get scanned by a Kinect and then see the flow around themselves. (Click image for video.)

• The latest issue of the Qpedia Thermal eMagazine includes an article about CFD analysis of synthetic jets.
• COMSOL shares this simulation of two-phase flow – specifically, Italian salad dressing.
• It’s time for part 2 of CEI’s how-to video on visualizing medical data in EnSight, this time with a focus on texture maps.
• Alenia Aermacchi was awarded an HPC Innovation Excellence Award for their use of CFD in the design of environmentally friendly aircraft.

Bursting Your Bubble

Given how bubble-wrap is so addictive from a tactile standpoint, it was only a matter of time before enterprising engineers and scientists at U.C. Berkeley applied computers to the physics of bubble popping. Now the problem is I can’t stop watching this video.

Simulation of soap film bubbles popping by U.C. Berkeley. Image from ISGTW. (Click image for link.)

Software and Applications

Streamline visualization from a simulation of a quad rotor in flight. Image from Symscape.

• Symscape illustrates the use of a Moving Reference Frame (aka frozen rotor model) for simulation of a quad rotor helicopter.
• Part 3 of a series of articles on pump cavitation analysis using CFX focuses on post-processing the CFD results.
• Intelligent Light‘s most recent email newsletter includes information on the upcoming FieldView 14, IL’s involvement in the most recent AIAA High Lift Prediction Workshop, and more.
• If you’re curious about how CFD would work in the cloud, take 7 minutes to watch this video of an external flow calculation with Ciespace.
• CD-adapco released STAR-CCM+ v8.04. This latest version includes improved solid modeling capabilities for working with CAD data, new propeller modeling, and an adjoint solver among other things.

Screen capture from a video illustrating STAR-CCM+’s overset grid capability for a gear simulation. Image from CD-adapco.

Events

• Flow Science has made available the proceedings of their 13th FLOW-3D European Users Conference (registration required).
• Your intent to participate in the 1st AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop is due by 01 July. The workshop will be held in conjunction with AIAA SciTech 2014 in January.
• The Code_Saturne Team announced the availability of presentations from their user meeting.

News in Brief

• Turbulence certainly is an enduring challenge for fluid dynamics (brief article and video).
• If you have 30 minutes to spare you can hear an interview with Rand’s Ryan Stamm on CFD consulting.
• Here’s the best of the visualization web for May 2013.
• ANSYS eNews has been published for June 2013 and includes an article about magnet simulations.
• CFD Online introduced a discussion forum for Exa.

Odds and Ends

• Do you remember when engineering colleges had songs? Neither do I. [And I dare not ask why mechanical engineers are "smutty."]
• Certainly you’ve seen the video of the flying bike. This proves that propulsion guys can make anything fly by strapping on a big enough engine.
• And I know you’ve heard of 3D printing but did you hear about the 3D Printing Art Show? [One must forgive the enthusiasm of Geomagic's Ping Fu who extolls the virtue of designing "when they aren’t held back by material needs, fabrication issues or any of those other things..." Having limited experience with 3D printing I can tell you that model validation, choice of material, and the type of fabrication are significant barriers to success. Granted, what we were attempting (printing a mesh) was pushing the envelope.]

3D printed Mobius strip by Henry Segerman. Image from FabLabNyack.

High Stakes CFD Challenge

It’s difficult to imagine higher stakes for CFD accuracy than predicting whether or not an intracranial aneurysm will rupture. But that’s exactly the basis for a CFD challenge issued by the Otto Von Guericke Universität Magdeburg.

Reconstructed surface geometries of two patient-specific aneursyms are available in STL format. Your challenge is to use CFD to not only predict which one of them ruptured but where. (The challenge’s organizers have video of the rupture.)

Can you predict which one of these two aneurysms will rupture? The two challenge geometries are shown in Pointwise.

A half-page abstract is due by 16 August including your computed wall shear stresses. The second due date is 13 September when participants will repeat the computations using prescribed boundary conditions.

All the details may be found at the CFD Challenge’s website.

Software

• CADNexus announced the release of Version 1.5 of their CFD Connector. This product provides a framework for iterative CFD studies. The CFD Connector uses CAPRI for the CAD interface, Microsoft Excel for run steup, and OpenFOAM for the CFD. The free version of the CFD Connector works only with geometry in STL format whereas the full version works with CAD in several native formats.
• Release 7.24.0 of BRL-CAD, the open source CSG modeler, is now available.
• Beta CAE released ANSA v14.1.2.
• CCE Labs is offering for free a multi-CAD view called Express 3D. [I installed the software and had no trouble importing and viewing several CAD files. It does not support ACIS files. The application does require you to authenticate using your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account.]

Business

• CD-adapco has acquired Red Cedar Technology. The two companies have been collaborating for over a year on integration of Red Cedar’s multi-disciplinary design optimization software with CD-adapco’s CFD and CAE tools.
• If you’re interested in CFD for urban modeling, the Singapore-ETH Center for Global Environmental Sustainability is hiring.

Applications

• CEI shares two videos illustrating how EnSight can be used to postprocess results from AcuSolve. [Full disclosure: one of the videos is Pointwise's.]
• The use of CFD in conjunction with other pipeline software is described in an article about flow assurance. [I've always found the phrase "flow assurance" to be both quaint and frightening.]

Gas flow (red) into water (blue) through a T-junction. Image from Offshore Magazine.

CFD on a Water-Filled Computer

Believe it or not, they say it wasn’t until the 1980s that digital computers surpassed the “water computer” in Russia. The water (or hydraulic) computer shown below was built in 1936 by Vladimir Lukyanov. His area of application wasn’t CFD but the fracture mechanics of concrete. Don’t you think it would be fitting to program a water computer to solve the Navier-Stokes equations?

Vladimir Lukyanov’s water computer from 1936. Image from Digital Journal.

Software

• Stanford’s SU2 open-source CFD code is now maintained on GitHub. Visit the repository here.
• CEI announced that EnSight now supports TRK (particle track files) from STAR-CCM+. (Be sure to watch the videos.)
• A brief article about acoustic simulation of turboprop noise.

Included here primarily for the mesh. This is an aeroacoustic simulation of aircraft cabin noise from turboprops. Image from SAE.

Business

• If you’ve ever struggled to make sense of the business side of CAE you’ll probably want to take the time to listen to this interview with Monica Schnitger on the Life Upfront podcast. [Although I'm dubious that earnings season is more exciting than football season.]
• Forbes delves into the issue of reinventing CAD for the cloud. [Warning: the term democratization is used.]

Applications

Airfoil simulation done on a GPU. Image from NVIDIA.

• Students at TU Clausthal used a GPU for transient airfoil simulations on meshes with 300,000 cells.
• Symscape describes the CFD simulation of a pitot tube and manometer.
• CFD will be used to study sand erosion.
• Anyone looking for aerodynamic data to valid their CFD should go immediately to NASA’s website for the Common Research Model (CRM).

NASA CRM model installed in a wind tunnel. Image from NASA.

Fluids and Crystals

We know what fluids are and we know that crystals are rigid solids with some very interesting material properties. Furthermore, we all know what LCDs are. But what about a crystalline liquid?

Using a computer simulation, physicists at La Sapienza University in Rome showed that if you chill a colloid in just the right way you get a stable fluid that also has the properties of a solid, like a crystal. The technical paper is available at Nature Physics, registration required.

When the Fluid is the Computer

Having just mentioned LCDs, the segue to this news item is perfect (even if the fluid is only the display and not the entire computer). The AquaTop projects images onto a fluid surface while a Kinect tracks your interactions with the fluid and hence the projected display.

A recent article complained that engineering students graduate without ever getting their hands dirty building things. I wonder if those employers will be happy if students are getting their hands wet?

The AquaTop computer display developed by Tokyo’s University of Electro-Communications is truly what you’d call an immersive environment. Image is a screen capture of a video from CNET.

News Briefs

• On the Life Upfront podcast, Jeff Waters interviews Rich Smith, the man behind affordable CFD – Caedium from Symscape.
• If you haven’t already seen this video demonstration of extracting 3D editable objects from a single photo please watch it now.
• Moldex3D users can win prizes and acclaim by submitting their work to the 2013 Moldex3D Global Innovation Talent Award.
• The September 2013 issue of ANSYS eNews is available.
• You can call it “the cloud” or you can call it SaaS (software – or simulation – as a service) but either way Desktop Engineering delves into Ciespace CFD.
• On another cloud-related note, Desktop Engineering writes about the UberCloud CAE Experiment.
• COMSOL shares their thoughts on turbulence modeling.

Software

• Beta CAE released v14.1.3 of their pre- and post-processing suite.
• ESTECO released modeFRONTIER 4.5.
• Tecplot ChemBond, a new tool for visualizing quantum theory of atoms in molecules, is the subject of an APS paper about making stronger metals.
• STAR-CCM+ v8.06 will feature their Simulation Assistant, a tool for capturing your organization’s best practices.

Events

• Chalmers University is offering a course on Applied LES, DES, and URANS for Industry on 23-25 October in Gothenburg.
• CD-adapco’s STAR Korean Conference 2013 will be held 5-6 December in Seoul.
• Friendship Systems’ User’s Meeting 2013 will be held 15-16 October in Berlin.
• ISC Cloud Computing Conference 2013 will be held 23-24 September in Heidelberg.

Hearts on Fire

To make up for today’s rather spartan edition of This Week in CFD, I share with you Rob Prideaux’s Smoke & Fire. Through trickery in the real world (as opposed to PhotoShop) Rob is able to shape fire in ways you wouldn’t think possible.

Rob Prideaux’s Fire & Smoke. Image from Laughing Squid.

Buyer’s Guide for Pre- and Postprocessing

Over on Engineering.com you’ll find an offer for a free copy of the FEA Buyer’s Guide for Pre- and Postprocessing Software. Registration is required for the paper but the website reveals quite a bit. Written by the Femap folks at Siemens PLM Software, the report delves into issues of accuracy, CAD data, model creation, solver support and user experience. Change FEA to CFD in the title and most everything is still valid.

From CD-adapco…

There are so many items from CD-adapco this week that I’m bundling them all under one heading.

CFD simulation of the Bauer Catfish done using STAR-CCM+ at Creaform. Image from Bauer Ltd. Click image for article.

• In a preview of STAR-CCM+ v8.06, CD-adapco blogs about new multiphase capabilities including particulates.
• Job openings [this is not an exhaustive list]
  • senior account manager in Brazil
  • software architect in Austin, Texas
• CD-adapco’s Stephen Ferguson shares a hard-earned list of seven tips for engineering simulation.
  1. “It’s all about the mesh.” [Couldn't agree more.]
  2. [You had me at mesh. Be sure to read the entire list yourself.]
• CD-adapco has licensed D-Cubed from Siemens for use in geometric constraint management.
• CD-adapco shares a 22 minute video on the use of STAR-CCM+ by BYU undergraduate students. (Registration required.) [I especially like the student comment at the 10:20 mark: "much simpler than we thought it would be, except for meshing."]

Screen capture of a student-created CFD simulation using STAR-CCM+ at BYU.

News in Brief, Part 1

• Pointwise V17.1 R4 was released for CFD mesh generation and includes new file-level compatibility with the GridPro structured grid generator, a native interface to the TAU CFD solver, and more.
• CFPD software released a GPU-accelerated version of Barracuda that is up to 650% faster for performing fluidized bed simulations.
• Altair’s new Hyperworks Virtual Wind Tunnel is a customized application of their AcuSolve technology that targets the automotive industry.
• CEI released EnSight 10.0.3e for CFD visualization and postprocessing.
• The folks at Altair ask and answer the question How Refined Should a Mesh Be?
• NAFEMS is offering a 1-day seminar on Computational Aeroacoustics to be held in Gaydon UK on 20 November 2013.
• NAFEMS is also hosting a Simulation Data Management symposium in Troy, Michigan on 21 November 2013.
• Ciespace posted a “getting started” video on vimeo that is good for customers new to their cloud based tool. There are a lot of preliminaries and the good stuff starts at about 3:30. [Every time I see a Ciespace demo I'm amazed at what can be done in a web browser.]
• Speaking of the cloud, Tech Soft 3D announced upcoming versions of their 3D CAD and visualization technology specifically designed for mobile and cloud-based applications.

Screen capture of a fluidized bed reactor simulation from Barracuda VR.

News in Brief, Part 2

• Pointwise’s Y+ Calculator, a mobile app for computing wall spacing in a viscous CFD simulation, is now available for Android in addition to iPhone.
• The Learn CAX blog shares information for those of you who wish to go hard-core with Autodesk Inventor’s C++ API for the purposes of tessellation.
• Learn CAX is also making available for free all their training materials for ANSYS’ Gambit. [I learned from this article that Gambit is an acronym for Geometry And Mesh Building Intelligent Toolkit. Engineers have a fetish for acronyms, especially forced and contrived ones, which I have yet to fully understand.]
• Tecplot shares information about how they resolved storage bottlenecks for their automated software build system.
• Back on the CFD postprocessing side of things, Tecplot will discuss the postprocessing of one billion cells in a webinar on 10 October.
• On the SolidWorks blog you can read about using the Parametric Study tool in SolidWorks Flow Simulation to conduct a series of simulations with varying geometry and flow conditions.
• Over on the Various Consquences blog you’ll find a round-up of CFD validation and verification resources.

Shocking Photographs

NASA researchers have developed ground to air Schlieren which is just what it sounds like – lasers and cameras that let you take Schlieren photographs of an aircraft in supersonic flight in order to visualize the shock waves. In the example shown below an F-18 passes in front of the sun.

Ground-to-air Schlieren photography was used to capture the shock structure around an F-18 as it passes in front of the sun. Image from International Science Grid This Week.

“Just The Facts” Edition

CFD solution for a bike helmet using Acusolve. Image from Altair.

• The National Cancer Institute is assessing the state of the art in biomedical CFD with a series of benchmark computations for a blood pump. Should you choose to participate, CFD results are due 31 July 2014. All the details are at the link.
• CFD for offshore structures
• Flow Science has made the proceedings of their FLOW-3D conference available for download.
• The 1st Pan-American Conference on Computational Mechanics (PANACM 2015) will be held 27-29 April 2015 in Buenos Aires.
• STAR-CCM+ v8.06 will have enhanced features for CAD associativity.
• Intelligent Light is offering a white paper on analyzing the CFD solutions from the high lift prediction workshop.
• Altair shares the story of using CFD to design a bicycle helmet.

Last Year’s News

• From the Better Late Than Never Department comes this roundup by Desktop Engineering of Christmas-themed CFD solutions. In Have Yourself a Merry Little Solver you’ll find CFD solutions from Hanley Innovations, Symscape, and UFO-CFD (see image below).
• Monica Schnitger provides a cogent summary of 2013.
  • The cloud means flexibility for how customers use software.
  • The cloud also means clouds of points and their use as geometry.
  • “Don’t underestimate Autodesk.”
  • See the rest of her analysis at the link.

UFO-CFD computed the flow around a skydiving Santa Claus. Image from Desktop Engineering.

Events & Other News

• The International Aerospace Engineering Conference, themed “Harnessing Novel Technologies in Aerospace Engineering,” will be held 28-29 August 2014 in Dubai.
• Desktop Engineering’s Anthony J. Lockwood really likes the case made by Tech-Clarity’s Jim Brown on why you should have a unified CAD strategy (i.e. use a single CAD product for everything). Brown’s ROI computations make for a compelling argument.
• If you’ve ever asked yourself “What is an FEA Solver?” this article is for you. But what I liked most about it is the illustration of pre, solver, and post (included below).

The FEA process – pre, solver, post – as illustrated on the FEA for All blog.

Software & Applications

• Tecplot RS 2013 Release 2 is now available for oil and gas reservoir modeling.
• Beta CAE introduced a new product for CAE workflow management called SPDRM.
• Volume 5 Issue 4 of CFD Letters is available including six articles. The publishers are also seeking subject matter experts to write editorials for the journal.
• Watch the shock wave from a detonation.
• “…for the first time all fluid dynamic design during America’s Cup has been carried out with the use of CFD only.” For Oracle Team USA this means STAR-CCM+.

CFD solution for Oracle Team USA’s catamaran computed using STAR-CCM+. Image from Desktop Engineering.

Not Fluids But You Won’t Care

Three-dimensional Mid-Air Acoustic Manipulation by Ultrasonic Phased Arrays. Yawn.

Levitation and Tractor Beams. WOW.

[Anyone who had a big stereo system in the 70s and 80s knows about this already through actual experience. Kids these days with their ear buds have to rediscover it.]

Japanese researchers have developed a method for moving millimeter sized particles in 3D space using intersecting acoustic waves. Image from Colossal. Click on image for animation.

Software

• NVIDIA maintains a CFD resource page on their website with many technical reports and code samples about GPU-accelerated CFD.
• The former Belmont Technology is now Onshape, “a venture-funded startup founded by members of the original SolidWorks team plus top engineers from the CAD, data center, mobile and streaming media industries.” [Draw your own conclusions about what their products will be like.]
• CD-adapco and SpaceClaim announced STAR-SpaceClaim, a module for SpaceClaim Engineer that provides 3D model transfer to STAR-CCM+ in a manner that eliminates the need for geometry clean-up.
• I think we could all use a gentle introduction to parallel programming with MPI.
• CEI released EnSight 10.0.3g, a maintenance release.

Jobs

I can only assume this surge in CFD-related job postings is good news.

• TotalSim has job openings for those seeking a career in CFD.
• CFD Team Lead in Dearborn, MI
• Onshape is hiring people who know CAD, CAM, PDM, PLM, CAE, MATLAB, Android, iOS, JavaScript, C++ or Java.
• You could be a Junior Aerodynamicist (CFD) at Wirth Research.
• A growing company in Germany seeks a General Manager (CAD, CFD, Mechanical Analysis Software).
• Honeywell in Tulsa, Oklahoma wants to hire a Research & Development Engineer – CFD.
• Pointwise is now accepting resumes for summer 2014 internships on both our technical support and product development teams.

Applications

I don’t remember where I saw this first, but it’s a racing bike paint job that mimics FEA results on the structure. Click the image to link to its source.

• I would really like to see some applied CFD results for Pterosaur aerodynamics.
• COMSOL demonstrates how to parameterize dumb CAD geometry for analysis.
• Siemens PLM Software shares the story of how NX CAE cut preprocessing time in half.
• Words to live by in the new year: Symscape’s 12 CFD tips.
• The latest installment of CFD 1010 from Flow Science is an illustration of numerical instability.

Awards

• Mentor Graphics FloTHERM XT was included in a list of Hot 100 Products of the Year and also recognized as China Innovation Best Product.
• MSC Nastran Embedded Fatigue was awarded CAE Innovation of the Year.
• PTC announced the winners of their 2013 PTC Creo Holiday Season Design Contest.

One of the 3 winning entries from PTC’s holiday design contest. Design by Vladimir Palffy. Image from ptc.com.

Flight of the Bumblebee

Due to their relatively small size, micro air vehicles (what the mainstream media would probably call span-challenged drones) suffer from a lack of controllability in unsteady flowfields. In order to come up with ideas for improving this situation, researchers at Harvard put bumblebees in a wind tunnel in the wake of a circular cylinder and observed how they manage to fly in a relatively unperturbed manner. You’ll have to click through to see the video and find out what they learned. See the article and video at BBC News. See the research paper at the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Photo of a bee in a wind tunnel. Image from BBC News.

Bonus: Even though it looks like what happens when I try to make RoTel (R) cheese dip, watch how this block of Velveeta (R) cheese gives a red hot nickle ball a hard time. I declare cheese to be the winner but wonder if this is the best use for the cheese product given the current shortage. But apparently there is no shortage of hot balls of nickle.

Software

• CEI announced that CPFD Software will bundle their EnSight software with CPFD’s Barracuda for visualization of computational particle fluid dynamics solutions of fluidized reactors. In a related blog post, CEI shares examples of Barracuda solutions visualized in EnSight. Also see image below.
• DEVELOP3D writes about how SpaceClaim‘s broadening user community has resulted in many new capabilities that make it a “slick tool.”
• WindSim AS launched a cloud-based version of their CFD toolset for wind turbine analysis.

Screen capture from a EnSight video of a Barracuda CFD solution of a gasifier showing volume fraction of particles. Image from CEI.

Applications

• NASA’s work on reducing aircraft noise is described in this article from International Science Grid This Week. Simulations performed using Exa’s PowerFLOW have shown how a new device can decrease flap-generated noise. (Noise is the number one complaint reported to the FAA.)
• CFD solutions computed using STAR-CCM+ for the latest bicycle racing helmet from Louis Garneau compared to within 4% of wind tunnel test results. See image below.

Screen capture from a video comparing the acoustic field for an aircraft with (right) and without (left) noise reducing devices. Image from ISGTW.

Reading & Jobs

• A printed version of I do like CFD Vol. 1, 2nd edition is now available with a special price discount that expires on 14 February.
• A new edition of the International Journal of CFD is now available online.
• [If you have the stomach for it.] Read this article about rooftop water collection tanks in New York City. [There's no CFD in here but it's a very practical example of everyday fluids.]
• Convergent Science seeks to hire a Business Development Manager/Account Executive for their Texas office.
• Applied Research Associates has an opening for a FEA/CFD Engineer or Scientist in Reston, Virginia.

CFD solution from STAR-CCM+ for a Louis Garneau cycling helmet. Image from HPC Magazine.

Events

• Flow Science announced the 2014 FLOW-3D Americas User Conference to be held 9-10 September 2014 in Toronto.
• NAFEMS extended the abstract deadline for the NAFEMS Americas Conference 2014 to February 17th. The event will be held 28-30 May in Colorado Springs.

Alert reader Walker B. pointed me at this video of the dynamic patterns on the surface of heated soap bubbles. Click image (from New Scientist) for the video. Email FYFD for an explanation of the science.

Grid Generation the Hard Way

Back in the day, grid generation could mean a Fortran DATA statement. [Look it up, kids.] Sometimes it felt like you were drawing the grid by hand.

Which is exactly what artist Susie MacMurray does in her series of pen on paper gauze bandage drawings. You’ll have to take my word for it that the image below pales in comparison to the real thing which is quite intricate and detailed. I had the pleasure of seeing one of these drawings during a recent visit to the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock. [She would probably not take kindly to a suggestion to apply a little smoothing with an elliptic PDE based method.]

Susie MacMurray, Gauze Bandage 2009. Image from Ms. MacMurray’s website.