CD-adapco + Siemens

One billion dollars [approx.] is an attention-getting amount of money.

The biggest CFD news of the week which you’ve all probably heard already was Siemens’ purchase of CD-adapco for $970 million (approx. 5x revenue). CD-adapco will be added to Siemens’ Digital Factory Division, specifically their PLM software line.

• Industry analyst Monica Schnitger wrote about the deal here and here (from Siemens’ Analyst Call).
• DEVELOP3D wrote about the transaction here. There’s an interesting line in their article that I’ll quote here: “The CFD market is one that’s seeing a lot of action at the entry level – we’ve seen a number of start-ups come online in the last few months. But as ever, the real money to be made in CFD is at the high-end.”
• It’s on HPC-Wire and Bloomberg and TenLinks.

ANSYS, Exa, and now CD-adapco are publicly traded companies. I’m interested in your opinions on what that means for the rest of the vendors in the CFD market, especially the independents.

ANSYS 17.0

Our friends at ANSYS released ANSYS 17.0 with the tagline “Excellence Times 10” and featuring improvements across their entire suite of tools. Specifically for CFD, this software update includes UI enhancements, meshing improvements (see image below), robustness improvements for conjugate heat transfer, 90% efficient scalability to 129,000 cores, and more.

• Read what Desktop Engineering has to say about ANSYS 17.0.
• Read what TenLinks has to say.
• Watch ANSYS’ teaser video about 17.0.

This surface mesh was generated by Volvo using ANSYS 17.0’s automatic scripting capabilities. Image by Volvo from ANSYS. See link above.

Events

• SAVE THE DATE: The Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016 will be held 21-22 September in Fort Worth.
• Flow Science announced the 16th FLOW-3D European Users Conference will be held in Krakow, Poland on 14-16 June 2016. The call for abstracts is now open with a due date of 22 April.
• The call for papers for the NAFEMS Americas Conference 2016 (7-9 June, Seattle) is open but the abstract deadline of 31 January is rapidly approaching.
• The CONVERGE Combustion Summit will be in Nice, France on 04 May 2016.
• The modeFRONTIER International Users’ Meeting will be held on 17-18 May 2016 in Trieste, Italy.

News & Jobs

• “The internet’s favorite fluid dynamics blog,” FYFD, has launched a subscription campaign as the start of many new things coming in 2016 because the site’s author, Dr. Nicole Sharp, will be working on FYFD “full-time.”
• You could win a quadcopter drone in Tecplot’s 2016 Plot Contest. Your plots are due by 31 March.
• There’s a contract position for a CFD Engineer in the Detroit area.
• Foam-U is advertising a PhD position in LES modeling of atomization.

Applications

• Here’s part 3 of a series of articles on CFD and DCIM (data center information management) in which the term “the Tetris effect” is introduced. See image below.
• [Sweet, rich, creamy] CFD for dairy products via Software Cradle.

Example of using CFD for data center thermal management. Image from The Data Center Journal. See link above.

Software

• OpenCFD released OpenFOAM v3.0+. (From their website, “OpenFOAM+ uses the OpenFOAM Foundation version as a common code base, and offers wider functionality and platform support.”) This new release includes updates in meshing, physical models, and more.
• Autodesk Meshmixer 3.0 was announced. [I infer nothing from the broken image link on that web page.]
• GridPro v6.5 was released with UI and automation improvements. (See image below.)
• Flow Science released FLOW-3D/MP 6.1, the HPC version of FLOW-3D.
• OpenVSP 3.5.1 was released for parametric aircraft geometry.
• I’ve just learned about ANAMESH, meshing software from French company Lemma.

Submarine grid in GridPro v6.5. Image from PDC. See link above.

Unstructured Abstraction

An exhibition celebrating the 80th anniversary of the group American Abstract Artists is a showcase of “the continued relevance and vitality of art that communicates directly through the eye, reaching our intellect and our emotions without words.”

Joanne Mattera, Chromatic Geometry 22, 2015. Image from artist’s website. See link above.