Business

• NAFEMS needs your input for their Analysis Needs Survey by which they intend to assess current CAE usage, criteria for CAE success, and trends for future CAE usage.
• Monica Schnitger provides a good overview of ESI’s year-end financial results to which OpenCFD (i.e. OpenFOAM consulting) contributed €343,000 to a total of €109 million for an aggregate growth of 16%. She quotes ESI as continuing the tradition of overt and explicit references to trademarks in that they responded to the growing demand for open-source solutions “by integrating the software and trademark of OpenFOAM.” As a counterpoint, Schnitger quotes ANSYS’ Jim Cashman’s opinion that the market’s interest in open-source CAE solutions is dropping because people are realizing free software isn’t really free. [That’s true. Free software is free like a puppy is is free.]
• The March 2013 of ANSYS eNews is now online.
• More 3D printing news: Stratasys announced the finalists for their Extreme Redesign 3D Printing Challenge, a competition for middle school, high school, and college students.
• Houston’s WS Atkins seeks a CFD Engineering Consultant.

Tet Meshes in the Most Surprising Places

You find tet meshes in the most surprising places. In this case, it’s a 1903 photograph of Alexander Graham Bell kissing a woman holding a tetrahedral kite from National Geographics’ Found photo blog.

Software

• ANSYS 14.5 is reviewed on the DEVELOP3D blog with a special emphasis on how ANSYS Workbench is the nexus for bringing together all their simulation tools.
• This article about the history of CATIA is worth reading if only to learn what the acronym CATIA stands for.
• Is anyone using cloud computing provider Rescale to run CFD using ANSYS Fluent, NASA CFL3D, Converge CFD, NASA FUN3D, OpenFOAM, or STAR-CCM+? [This question is not a value judgement. It’s just a query.]
• Mentor Graphics introduced FloTHERM XT, a new integrated MDA-EDA tool for electronics cooling.
• Materialise released Mimics16 and 3-matic8, software for editing geometry data obtained from medical CT and MRI scans.
• VirtualGrid released their point-cloud processing software, VRMesh v7.6, with many performance improvements.
• Autodesk’s Project Falcon (an airflow simulator with “revolutionary automatic meshing technology”) has been updated and a stand-alone version is available for download.
• Mesh2Surface is a Rhino plugin for converting polygonal meshes to a CAD model.
• The OpenFOAM Foundation released OpenFOAM v2.2.0 with a new framework for selecting and applying physics modules to the simulation.

Applications

Velocity contours from a CFD solution by Dyson. Image via the Leap Australia CFD blog.

• Dyson, hand dryers, vacuums, fans and CFD.
• When students at McGill University (specifically a group called Demilitarize McGill) tours the CFD lab there (and the adjacent offices of Prof. Habashi’s company, Newmerical Technologies) the sinister nature of aircraft de-icing is revealed. [sarcasm intended]
• This video illustrates how to extract the fluid domain from a CAD model for use in NX CFD.
• Here’s the best of the visualization web for February 2013.

Events

• The COE 2013 Annual PLM Conference & TechniFair will be held in Orlando on 21-24 April 2013.
• The ERCOFTAC course Design Optimization II: Methods and Applications will be held in Wolfsburg, Germany on 10-11 April 2013.
• Presenters and presentations have been announced for the 2013 MSC Users Conference. [A quick glance revealed one or maybe two papers on CFD: one is by and about Cradle CFD, the other mentioned the use of STAR-CCM+. All references to meshing appear to be for FEA analyses.]
• Spatial’s 3D Insider’s European Forum will be held on 6-7 June 2013 in Darmstadt, Germany.
• The 2013 FLOW-3D World Users Conference will be held in Chicago on 19-20 September.
• Here are a few articles summarizing this week’s STAR Global Conference: from the CAD CAM blog (Part 1, Part2 – they’re written in German) and from Monica Schnitger.

Who Flung Paint?

Photographer Fabian Oefner combines a little paint with a little centrifugal force to produce these amazing photographs that he calls Black Hole.

Black Hole photography by Fabian Oefner