New Releases

Starfish for rarefied gas/plasma flows. Image from Particle in Cell.

• FE-DESIGN released TOSCA Fluid 2.3.0 for fluid flow topology optimization. This new version has an enhanced GUI, shorter computation times, and improved reconstruction of the final design.
• Particle in Cell completed development of a new 2D rarified gas/plasma solver called Starfish.
• MicroCFD version 1.8 now supports multi-core CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs for improved performance.
• Hibou Scientific Software released Khamsin v0.8, a SketchUp plugin for CFD modeling. (Note: OpenFVM is no longer supported.)

Events

• Registration is open for NAFEMS North America Conference ’12 to be held in Washington, DC on 11-12 September. The event will include several CFD-oriented sessions and seminars.
• The 9th Conference on Differential Equations and Computational Simulations will be held 4-6 October 2012 at Mississippi State University. The preregistration deadline has been extended to 7 September.

News in Brief

• Simulation Works, maker of the KUBRIX mesh generation software, has been acquired by Itasca Consulting, consultants and software providers to the geomechanics, hydrogeological, and microseismics communities.
• NASA’s Technology Transfer Portal is your starting point for adding NASA technology, including CFD, to your company’s portfolio.
• CD-adapco published the latest issue of their Academics Newsletter including the announcement that Donald Riedeberger from the University of Stuttgart won the 2012 academic simulation image contest with a visualization of the boundary layer transition on a dolphin. [Image too small to be included here.]
• Results from the 1st AIAA Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop are available online.
• The Role of CFD in Water Treatment from Siemens
• IDAC shares this video of synthetic external flow vorticity generation.
• There’s a job opening for a mesh generation software developer in the Seattle area.

Voronoi Egg

A Voronoi polyhedra on an ellipsoid decorated Nantes, France this summer.

Ah, France. The food, the wine, the art. The city of Nantes held a summer festival during which artists were asked to make us think about urban space. One installation (shown above) featured a bizarre egg. “All at once, immense and immaterial, Voronoï is a phantom architecture. The closest you get the most invisible it becomes. In it centre you completly forget it and appreciate the view standing on a tree.”

Read more about the concept behind this piece and see more photographs of it including its construction.