Symposium: Jameson, Roe, van Leer

Four Decades of CFD: Looking Back and Moving Forward is a symposium that will honor the careers of three giants of CFD: Anthony Jameson, Phil Roe, and Bram van Leer. The objectives of the symposium are to evaluate the current status of CFD and to chart its future.

The symposium will be held in San Diego on 22-23 June 2013, conveniently timed to be immediately prior to the AIAA Fluid Dynamics et al meeting on 24-27 June 2013, also in San Diego. [Note: The JRV symposium will be held in The Westin while AIAA Fluids will be held in the Sheraton.]

Attendance will be capped at 150. Don’t delay your registration.

• Symposium website
• Z.J. Wang’s blog post announcing the symposium

Winner of The Meshy Award for 2013

A team of engineers at CRAFT Tech won Pointwise’s Meshy Award for 2013 for their hybrid mesh for a low head safety injection pump for nuclear reactors consisting of 21.5 million cells and over 950 topological zones including the inlet, impeller, leakage flow paths, diffuser, collector, and discharge flow paths.

The Meshy Award 2013 winner from CRAFT Tech.

Products

• Take eight minutes to watch this video about what’s new in Autodesk Simulation CFD 2014.
• Are you aware of CEI’s Python Exchange where you can download scripts that add capability to Ensight?
• Aerodynamic Solutions seeks participants to beta test their cloud-based CFD product, Cloud Leo.
• TransMagic R10 for CAD data exchange was released with support for new CAD formats, XML output, and Windows 8 support and many other features.
• ESI announced OpenSIM, a GUI for OpenFOAM. OpenSIM includes STL and mesh import, flow computation, and export to visualization software. [I could not find information about OpenSIM on ESI’s website, only at CFD Online and CFD Review. I infer that ESI will reveal the details at the OpenFOAM User Conference later this month.]

Screen capture from Autodesk’s video about CFD 2014.

Events

• A preliminary agenda was announced for the NAFEMS World Congress (coming this June to Salzburg, Austria). Keynotes will be delivered by Ralph Sundermeier (Volkswagen), Frank Popielas (Dana Corp.), Jérôme Buffe (Thales Alenia Space), Koichi Ohtomi (Toshiba), Steven Sirman (Tata Steel Automotive), Harald Hasselblad (Volvo), and Grant Steven (Univ. of Sydney).
• The SIAM Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling will be held 11-14 November 2013 in Denver. The abstract deadline (8 April) is rapidly approaching.
• The agenda for May’s Collaboration and Interoperability Congress includes the NASA/ESA product data meeting, the PDES board meeting, and the 3D PDF consortium meeting.  Speakers include Thomas Kurfess, assistant director for advanced manufacturing at the office of science and technology policy in the executive office of the president of the USA.
• The abstract submission deadline for SC13 (i.e. Supercomputing) has been extended to 19 April.
• Next week’s CFD seminar at the National Institute of Aerospace will be on multigrid schemes in DLR’s Tau Code.
• In her post-event blog post about CD-adapco’s STAR Global Conference, Monica Schnitger shared these interesting nuggets.
  • One third of CD-adapco’s 750 employees are developers.
  • CD-adapco’s revenue this year will approach $200 million.
  • A SpaceClaim client is coming.
  • Support for 32-bit Windows and 32-bit Linux is going away in 2014.

‘Tis the Season for Surveys

It seems that there’s been a new survey in the CFD/CAE business every couple of weeks since the beginning of the year. The latest is a combined effort by ANSYS and the Aberdeen Group by which they intend to “identify the latest trends for improving product development efficiency using simulation.” Participants are promised “first access” to the results [i.e. you’ll be one of the first who has the opportunity to pay for the report] shortly after 30 April. The survey takes 15-20 minutes to complete.

• ANSYS/Aberdeen Group survey

Applications

• Here’s an interesting teaser article about CFD in the chemical process industries that begins promisingly [except for use of the term democratized] with “Better mesh generation and GUIs have democratized the use of computational fluid dynamics.” However, to read the full article you have to register for a free 7-day trial of the site but you have to provide your credit card number. [I hate that kind of crap and will not be using HighBeam Research in the future.]
• It appears that simFlow is a CFD consultancy based on OpenFOAM.
• Vol. 27, Issue 2 of the International Journal of CFD is now online. Taylor & Francis is celebrating the 20th year of this journal by providing free access.
• Peterbilt used CFD to improve the aerodynamics of their super truck and doubled its gas mileage.
• CFD isn’t just for your grandfather’s aircraft. Check out what they’re doing with kiteboards at Flysurfer.

Pressure distribution (colors) and streamlines around a Flysurfer kite. Image from Flysurfer.

Other News

• Prof. David Schmidt of the Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst will spend one month this summer on adding an Eulerian spray model to CONVERGE CFD.
• Read about state-changing metal oxides and how they may make silicon-based transistors irrelevant, especially in 20 years when it’s predicted that their rate of advancement will flatline.

Making a Splash

Artist Paolo Wang was learning how to use RealFlow to do fluid simulations and the result was a short video called Splash. Imagine what he can do now that he’s learned the software.

Part of a fluid simulation from Paulo Wang’s video Splash.