NAFEMS Professional Simulation Engineer

NAFEMS launched their Professional Simulation Engineer (PSE) competency certification and tracking system at their recent NAFEMS World Congress in Salzburg. Their system of PSE competencies has been developed over the course of several years by their technical working groups and other experts as a means of assessing, maintaining, and developing the skills needed by those who utilize CAE tools.

Over 1,400 individual competencies are organized in 26 categories such as Fatigue, Dynamics and Vibration, and Electromagnetics. I see three categories that are relevant to CFD: Core CFD, Verification and Validation, and CAD-CAE Collaboration. The PSE system includes educational materials and resources. You must be a NAFEMS member to participate in the PSE program.

I have registered for the PSE Competency Tracker and in my infinite spare time will try – emphasize try – to experiment with the Core CFD topic. [Oops, first roadblock. I have to pass Fundamentals of Flow, Porous Media, and Heat Transfer first. I fear I will be proven incompetent.]

• NAFEMS PSE website

Applications

FYFD shares how flow viz isn’t limited to CFD with this photo of surface streaklines on the upper forebody of an F-18 at 26 degrees angle of attack.

• The airborne movement of particulates contributes to the fact that indoor air is less clean that outdoor air and that’s what’s being studied by researchers at Clarkson. [It’s not clear whether CFD is involved in their computational work. But I’m uncomfortable with the mention of going shoeless in the house. I’m uncomfortable with going shoeless at all.]
• SolidWorks includes NAFEMS benchmarks to help users build confidence in their simulation results. [How long before something like this comes to CFD?]
• Autodesk CFD is applied to the design of heat exchangers in the oil and gas industry.
• Everyone loves free software and everyone hates dealing with CAD interoperability issues. Therefore, we should all check out the free software offerings from CCE Labs as first noticed via CAD Insider.
  • A CATIA V5 translator for SolidWorks
  • A CATIA V5 assembly viewer
  • Ensuite-Lite for “quick access to CAD data”
• Assessment of flow-induced vibration in radial gates during extreme flood [PDF]
• Even in FEA they urge you to check your mesh quality. [The author throws designers under the bus – “CAD designers who have a passion for the smallest details and a flagrant lack of knowledge about the FEA analysis requirements.”]
• Australia’s DSTO recently purchased a supercomputer from Cray to perform CFD computations with hundreds of millions of cells for submarines.
• Here’s a video tutorial on using CEI’s EnSight with medical MRI data. (See also some slides explaining this “4D flow” visualization.)

People, Places, and News

• Paromita Mitra, an aerospace engineering undergrad at Mississippi State University, is competing in the Miss USA Pageant after being crowned Miss Mississippi.
• Intelligent Light’s Earl Duque is profiled in 5enses Magazine. [Earl is someone in the CFD business who’s worth knowing and reading about.]
• FWIW, the global CFD market is expected to grow at 13.33% [to the hundredths of a percent!] from 2012 to 2016 [their dates should be as accurate – from May 14, 2012 to November 3, 2016 at 2:35 p.m. and not a minute later] according to Research & Markets.
• There’s a new weekly source for CFD news – the CFD Newspaper at www.cfdpaper.com (compiled using paper.li)
• Autodesk has also made available Cloud 101, a presentation on what the cloud is and why it will be important to you. [When you go to the link and read the misinformation that motivated them to write this “ebook” you’ll know why I expected the fifth reason to be “78% of all statistics are made up.” Also, it says the ebook is 10 pages – it’s actually 8, not counting the cover.]

Events

Mach number distribution around an airfoil, computed with a high-order method. Image from DLR.

• Monica Schnitger provides a nice summary of the SIMULIA Community Conference. In it she cites the example of an automotive company who built a vertical app for side mirrors for use by their designers. The app uses iSight for geometry prep and STAR-CCM+ for everything else.
• Z.J. Wang summarizes the 2nd International Workshop on High-Order CFD Methods
  • Abstracts, summaries, and test cases are hosted by DLR.
  • The next workshop will be in January 2015 in conjunction with AIAA SciTech and every other year thereafter (time, not location).
  • 4-6 benchmark problems for the 2015 workshop will be defined within a couple of months.
  • The pacing item is generation of coarse, high-order meshes for realistic geometry. [The gauntlet has been laid down. Pointwise was called out. It is now up to us.]
• If you’ve ever attended the International Meshing Roundtable, they’re seeking nominations from you for IMR 2013 Fellow. They’re due 18 August.

Different Ways to Infinity

Different Ways to Infinity is a “science fiction artwork” that presents the results of an imaginary scientific laboratory in the form of images and videos. The video below and related pieces approach infinity through chaos. As first seen on the Triangulation Blog.

Different Ways to Infinity, Simulation #2. Click image for video.