This Week in CFD

Posted on March 5, 2021 by John Chawner

Visualization is such a big part of CFD (for better or worse) that an article included in this week’s compilation of CFD news should make for interesting reading: lessons learned from developing open-source visualization software. The financial news from the CAE world continues to show increasingly positive results which is a good sign that we’re putting the economic effects of Covid-19 behind us. And make certain you update your calendars for the rescheduled AIAA Aviation. Shown here is a teaser of a beautiful mesh in our image of the week from NASA.

Continue reading →
Posted in Applications, Events, Hardware, News, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Geometry Modeling and Mesh Generation – Part 1

Posted on March 4, 2021 by John Chawner

NASA’s CFD Vision 2030 Study stated that “most standard CFD analysis processes for the simulation of geometrically complex configurations are onerous.” A major factor contributing to this perception is the preparation of geometry models for mesh generation, a task deemed a “significant bottleneck” in CFD workflows.

Why this should be so is often unclear. Many CFD practitioners know it to be true while also not fully appreciating the underlying reasons. That’s why we wrote Preparing Geometry Models for Mesh Generation and CFD, a 20-page paper that’s freely available on our website.

Continue reading →
Posted in Applications, Software | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

This Week in CFD

Posted on February 26, 2021 by John Chawner

This week’s CFD news, while formatted differently, includes all the usual suspects including an article about whether CAD files are going the way of the dodo. There’s a tasty CFD application involving gelato. The application case study about cars driving backwards makes me wonder about doing CFD on a plane flying backwards. And if you’ve ever wondered why geometry modeling is to mesh generation as turbulence modeling is to CFD, there’s a paper you need to download. Shown here is a screen cap of the video of the week of supersonic flow over a cylinder by Matthias Maier.

Continue reading →
Posted in Applications, Events, News, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Pointwise V18.4 R3 Now Available for CFD Mesh Generation

Posted on February 24, 2021 by John Chawner

Pointwise Version 18.4 R3 is now available for download and production use. V18.4 R3 is primarily a maintenance release and includes a new native interface to the AzoreCFD flow solver.

Continue reading →
Posted in News, Software | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Handiest CFD App – the Y+ Calculator

Posted on February 22, 2021 by John Chawner

The Y+ Calculator app is a handy tool for calculating the grid spacing to achieve a target y+ value for viscous computational fluid dynamics (CFD) computations. Simply specify the flow conditions, the desired y+ value, and compute your grid spacing.

If you are an engineer running viscous CFD computations, setting the distance of the first grid point off the wall is essential for accurately resolving the boundary layer. Y+ is a non-dimensional measure of wall spacing that has been normalized by wall shear stress. For turbulent boundary layers, y+ should be 1.

Continue reading →
Posted in Applications, Software | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment