News in Brief

• Dell has published the first in a promised series of CFD Primers.
• CD-adapco has made a significant update to their website. Be sure to watch the video update about aerospace and defense.
• Someone’s looking to hire mesh generation software developers for various locations throughout the U.S.
• CFD Online has added new discussion forums on topics only tangentially related to CFD.
  • System Analysis
  • Structural Mechanics
  • Electromagnetics
• GrabCAD continues their series of insightful articles about CAD. This time they take on the kernel.
• The proceedings of MSC Software’s 2013 Users Conference are now online (registration required).

What you don’t know about your kernel will hurt you when dealing with geometry. Image from GrabCAD.

Software

• CEI needs your help to decide their level of future Linux support for EnSight. They also released EnSight 10.0.3b.
• Flow Science announced the release of FLOW-3D/MP version 5.0, a hybrid parallel version of FLOW-3D v10.1.
• Dassault Systems made two recent acquisitions.
  • Announced on 25 April was the acquisition of FE-DESIGN, developer of TOSCA Fluid, an optimization technology for CFD simulations.
  • Announced on 07 May was the acquisition of SIMPOE, developer of plastic injection simulation software.

Things I Won’t Post Anymore

Enough already. It seems that photos of splashing liquids have jumped the shark. These photos by Manon Wethly are the last I’ll post.

An airborne beverage. Photo by Manon Wethly. Image from Colossal.

How Space is Like a Mesh

We’ve always been taught that the meshes we generate for CFD are just an approximation of reality, a man-made construct that facilitates numerical simulation. Space is a continuum. A mesh is a discretization.

It appears that space may actually be more like a mesh than anyone thought.

At very small distances, space acts like a chessboard with triangular tiles (i.e. a mesh) and this may be what gives electrons their spin. Image from UCLA.

Researchers at UCLA working on graphene have discovered that a discrete, rather than continuous, model of space may explain why electrons, which have no radius, can “spin” in only one of two states. By thinking of electrons in graphene as being confined to discrete spatial locations (i.e. the colored triangles in the image above) the change in their spin due to absorption of a photon can be explained.

God may not play dice with the universe but he may have meshed it.

Read more at the UCLA Newsroom: Is space like a chessboard?