Take This Survey

Engineering.com‘s Chad Jackson is running a survey on the Value of Simulation. It will not take you long to complete and the results should be of interest (and benefit) to all of us. Chad tells me he’ll close the survey in a week or two so don’t delay.

• Value of Simulation survey

New Releases

• Nek5000 is an open source, spectral element CFD solver. Nek5000 has its origins at the Argonne National Lab and shares ancestry with NEKTON, commercialized by Fluent. Their next development meeting will be held 7-8 December 2012 in Zurich, Switzerland.
• Tecplot released Tecplot Chorus 2012 R3 with several improvements to handling variables and customization in this simulation analytics tool.
• Daat Research released Coolit v.12 with improvements in both pre- and postprocessing. CAD import and the component library have been improved as has the ability to create animations.
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  New meshing from COMSOL

  COMSOL released Multiphysics 4.3a with more new features than can be easily listed here.

• ICON reacts favorably to ESI’s acquisition of OpenCFD and OpenFOAM. (ICON is hosting the Open Source CFD International Conference on 29-30 October in London.)

More CFD in the Cloud

After last week’s discovery that Ciespace‘s mission is now to build “an exciting new cloud platform for CAE applications,” along comes CFD Engine who is “rebooting CFD for the cloud.”

From their blog it seems they’re creating an online CFD experience that uses DropBox or similar tools for CAD upload, remote computing facilities, and open source CFD codes. The system is designed to be simple without sacrificing capability. They will also be providing consulting services where the overall process can be tailored to your specific application.

If you have or will use CFD Engine, I am very interested in hearing about your experiences. And from anyone, I’m interested in your opinion about whether the cloud is the right place for CFD.

Applications

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  OpenFOAM simulation of flow over a cyclist. Video from TotalSim.

  Read in Machine Design about how it only takes 5 minutes to go from CAD geometry to mesh for oil diffusers and filters.

• OpenFOAM required 3,000 core-hours to to compute this DES solution (video) of flow over a racing cyclist. [Apologies if I’ve posted this before. It looks familiar.]
• Autodesk provides what might be described as a CFD primer but it includes links to valuable resources.

Events

• Siemens PLM Software will host their NX CAE Symposium 2012 on 23-24 October in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Hendricks Motorsports Facility.
• The 4th International Congress on Computational Engineering and Sciences (FEMTEC) will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada on 19-24 May 2013.
• Proceedings of FLOW-3D User Conferences are available for download (registration required).

Jobs

• There’s an opening for a “Software Developer – Meshing” on Dice.com.
• Pointwise is looking for an engineer to add to our Tech Support team.
• The UK’s Daresbury Lab is seeking a “Computational Scientist in CFD and Industrial Applications.”

“The Heart Has Reasons That Reason Cannot Know”

French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal might not have made that quote above had he seen what CFD postprocessors Tecplot and EnSight have in store for us this week. Through some quirk of coincidence [and I checked my calendar – we’re not close to Valentine’s Day], both companies are sharing visualizations of the fluid mechanics of the human heart.

Flow through an artificial heart valve as visualized in Tecplot 360. Image from Tecplot.

Researchers at the University of California are using Tecplot to visualize the CFD results of flow through artificial heart valves to identify and eventually eliminate vortical abnormalities in the flow. The full case study is available online also.

EnSight visualization of MRI data of flow through a beating heart. Image from CEI.

Researchers at the Linkoping University in Sweden are using EnSight to visualize highly detailed MRI data of the flow through a beating human heart. Their image above was used as the cover art for the upcoming Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance conference.

Pointwise User Group Meeting 2013

We want you to join us, as presenter or attendee, at the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2013 coming up on 19-20 March 2013 in Fort Worth, Texas. The Call for Papers and Attendee registration are both open.

• Call for Papers
• Registration