Overset Grid Symposium in Dayton this October

The 11th Overset Composite Grids and Solution Technology Symposium will be held 15-18 October 2012 in Dayton, Ohio. Abstracts for both presentations and student posters are now being accepted with a deadline of 29 June. Topics being sought are unsteady and moving body problems, emerging hybrid strategies, works in progress as well as those recently completed.

The Symposium consists of three days of technical presentations preceded by one day of tutorials and workshops.

• Overset Symposium website

Exa Released PowerFLOW 4.4

Particles colored by velocity and sized by age. Simulation by PowerFLOW, postprocessed in PowerVIZ. Image from Exa.

Exa Corp. released PowerFLOW 4.4, the newest version of their Lattice Boltzmann CFD software suite. New features in this release are focused on user productivity and are said to include:

• Grid generation updates that are up to 80% faster
• Performance improvements of up to 15% on large clusters
• Templates for thermal and wind noise simulations

For more details:

• Exa’s announcement
• Exa’s PowerFLOW web page

Khamsin v0.7 Released for CFD in SketchUp

Hibou Scientific Software released Khamsin v0.7, their CFD software for the building industry that’s a plugin for SketchUp (formerly Google SketchUp). This latest version includes enhancements for how Khamsin works with OpenFOAM and Dolfyn. (Khamsin acts as an environment that interfaces with OpenFOAM, OpenFVM, Dolfyn, and EnSight CFD for the analysis.)

[I wonder whether Khamsin has been affected at all by Google’s recent sale of SketchUp to Trimble Navigation?]

• Hibou’s announcement
• Hibou’s video demonstration of Khamsin

Briefs

• Altair Hyperworks is now available for Mac OS X.
• NAFEMS’ The CAE Guy will be hosting a webinar pitting CFD experts vs. designers.
• The University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering has been awarded a $1.3M grant from the U.S. Dept. of Energy which will go, in part, to CFD simulations of high temperature gas reactors.
• Experimental and CFD Studies of Gas-Liquid Flow in Bends
• WindSim version 5.1 was released for CFD simulation of wind turbines.
• CFD modeling of heat sinks

Mesh Software Unlike Any I’ve Seen Before

Modeling knitted garments with Stitch Meshes

When I found another article with “mesh” and “software” in its title the result turned out to be completely unexpected. Stitch Meshes is software for simulating knitted garments. The software starts with a simple faceted model of the garment onto which one generates a mesh. Each cell of the mesh is assigned a particular type of stitch and a pattern tool is available for creating arrays of common stitch patterns. A relaxation technique is then applied to achieve a realistic model of the garment. Be sure to watch the video.

This article hits a little close to home because Pointwise shares a building with a retail yarn shop. Who knew we had so much in common?

• New Software is Making Stitch Meshes Magnificent from SolidSmack
• Stitch Meshes website