News

• Intelligent Light won a 2nd HPC Innovators Award from IDC for their work on analyzing large CFD datasets. The award was presented at SC13, the supercomputing conference. A webinar on 22 January with Intelligent Light and Cray will describe the technology behind this achievement.
• If you’re one of those jaundiced people who believe that CFD stands for Colorful Fluid Dynamics, this CFD code is for you: an ASCII based implementation of the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method. [As a fan of ASCII art back in the day I found this to be pretty darn cool.]

Screen capture from a video of a Simscale CFD simulation of a valve. Click image for video.

Software

• Geomagic now provides 3D printer drivers: CAD system, 3D print, straight to 3D printer. A very interesting application of meshing must be in those drivers.
• SpaceClaim Engineer 2014 is now available featuring multi-threading for performance improvement, a web-based model viewer, a new surface simplification tool, and more.
• MSC Software released MSC Nastran 2013.1.
• Fire Dynamics Simulator 6.0.1 was released.
• DEVELOP3D reviewed midasNFX for FEA analysis.

Events

• ERCOFTAC’s Hybrid RANS-LES Methods for Industrial CFD – IV will be held 22-23 May 2014 at the George Washington University.
• CD-adapco’s special deals on early registration for the STAR Global Conference expire on 31 December.
• The next annual meeting of the CFD Society of Canada will be held on 1-4 June 2014 in Toronto.

Business

• Dassault Systemes acquired 3D visualization software firm Realtime Technology.
• Altair acquired electromagnetics software firm EMSS.
• Exa reported a 12% growth in income for 2013 Q3 relative to the same period last year. Included in that $14.1 million total is an 8% growth in license income and a 30% growth in project revenue.

Applications

• LearnCAx writes about the CFD simulation of electrostatic precipitators.
• Desktop Engineering shares two non-traditional CFD applications, one of which was an Autodesk simulation of the airflow through and over Heinz Field, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team.
• The white paper The A to Z of Breaking a World Water Sport Record is available for free (with registration) from Mentor Graphics via Engineering.com.

Hull pressure contours from a FloEFD solution are superimposed on this photograph of a racing boat. From the paper referenced above.

Jobs

• There’s an opening for a CFD Team Lead in Dearborn, Michigan.
• In Santa Ana, California there’s an opening for a Principal Software Engineer – Mesh Generation.

FYFD’s Insight into Social Media and Fluid Dynamics Outreach

During November’s APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting, Nicole Sharp presented some findings obtained from surveying the readers of her fluid dynamics blog, F%^$ Yeah Fluid Dynamics.

• The blog has 180,000 followers and nearly 14,000 unique visitors per month.
• Roughly half the readers are in the 20-29 age range.
• Even though interesting photographs attract readers, it’s the explanation of various phenomena that keep them coming back.
• 29% of readers have been positively influenced by FYFD to pursue fluid dynamics in their schooling or career.

Because FYFD’s audience desires even more content (more frequent, longer, more original posts) the question Nicole poses to the community is how to best meet those desires in a way that benefits the field of fluid dynamics.

Read Nicole’s presentation slides from APS/DFD here.

Meshing the Ocean

I had heard that researchers simulating oceanographic flows preferred Cartesian grids but this is taking it a bit too far. The photograph below shows a phenomena called a cross sea state in which two systems of waves intersect at oblique (and in this case, right) angles.

A cross sea wave state. Photographed from the Lighthouse of the Whales at Ile de Re. Image from Wikipedia. First seen on Neatorama.