Software

• CEI shared two news items this week.
  • Convergent Science will offer Ensight-Desktop fully integrated with CONVERGE Studio for improved post-processing. The announcement includes a video of CONVERGE results made using EnSight.
  • EnSight is now up to six times faster for post-processing OpenFOAM results.
• With the 2014 release 3D Systems (formerly Geomagic) has renamed their entire software product line for “scan, design, inspect, print.”

Applications & Other News

• CD-adapco is seeking a Senior Morphing Developer for their Austin, Texas location.
• Symscape posted Part 1 of a 2-part series on a CFD comparison of a wind tunnel versus free air.
• John Peddie Research reports the computer graphics software industry will end 2013 at $17 million, growing from 2012’s $14 million.
• While not CFD, this video from CD-adapco of pool table simulation using discrete element modeling is cool.
• There’s a lot of historically significant CFD in NASA’s 30-year graphic timeline of modeling and simulation at their NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) Division.

A pictorial history of modeling and simulation at NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division. Screenshot from a NASA website.

Events

• ERCOFTAC will conduct a short-course on Best Practice for Engineering CFD II on 14-15 November 2013 in Amsterdam.
• Flow Science Japan will host the FLOW-3D Japan Users Conference 2013 in Tokyo on 25 October 2013.

Meshing Down on the Farm

“Green acres is the place to be
Farm meshing is the life for me”

With all due respect to TV theme songs of the 1960s, mesh generation has finally come home to the farm. A researcher in the UK developed a way to use a Voronoi diagram that’s customized to a particular plot of farmland and divides it into regions for combination planting using a GPS-based system. Through an arrangement of oats (the main crop in this case) and certain flowers that keep pests away on a “cell by cell” basis, the crops can be managed with less use of chemical pesticides.

Farmland can be subdivided using Voronoi polygons for so-called combination planting that reduces the need for chemical pesticides.