News & Jobs

Turbulent kinetic energy in a sewer line. Image from FLOW Science.

• FLOW Science published the Fall 2012 issue of their newsletter including an article about sewage CFD.
• General Dynamics Electric Boat, designers and builders of submarines for the U.S. Navy, has a job opening for a CFD Analyst in Groton, CT. They would like someone with Pointwise and/or Gridgen experience. [Electric Boat is one of the coolest places I’ve had the pleasure of visiting in my career.]
• Altair is seeking beta testers for HyperWorks 12.0.
• Code_Saturne 3.0 is due for release in January 2013. In the meantime, a beta version is available for testing.
• The Netherlands’ Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group wants to hire a CFD Consultant.
• For US$83 you can purchase Computational Fluid Dynamics, Ed. No. 2 from Research and Markets. This tome is said to be an introduction to CFD for students and first-time users.
• You can read about ANSYS‘ 3rd quarter financial performance here.

Applications

CFD as applied to sterilization of milk bottles. CFD by Tetra Pak. Image is a screen grab of a video from FoodProductionDaily.com.

• Tetra Pak used CFD to cut years off the development of their new asceptic carbon milk bottle. [Be certain to watch the video.]
• A CFD study of hydrogen production in a stirred tank reactor.
• Aviation Partners announced the recent testing of their CFD-designed and futuristic-looking scimitar winglets (which reportedly can improve cruise performance 30-40% over blended winglets).

A scimitar winglet from Aviation Partners. Image from the Royal Aeronautical Society blog.

Events

• Chalmers University announced the short course CFD for Vehicle Aerodynamics on 8-10 February 2013 in Gothenburg, Sweden.
• The European Turbulence Conference 14 will be held 1-4 September 2013 in Lyon, France.
• The International Conference on Numerical Geometry, Grid Generation, and Scientific Computing (NUMGRID2012) has been announced for 17-19 December 2012 in Moscow. Abstracts are due on 1 December. [Makes you wonder about the review process.]

The Coffee Ring Effect

As I sit here typing and enjoying my third cup of coffee [after a late night helping the high school marching band at a rare Thursday night football game] I’m wondering why coffee cup stains have a dark outer ring.

Wonder no more. The U. of Pennsylvania has produced this video of The Coffee Ring Effect showing the behavior of microscopic particles and some of the conditions under which they migrate to the outer edges of a spill.