Applications

• In an article published in Nature Communications, researchers show that animal wings and fins (i.e. natural propulsors) “bend in similar ways within a highly predictable range of characteristic motions.” [Does this surprise anyone? Note: full article available for a fee.]
• Here’s a performance study of OpenFOAM on the Intel Xeon E7 and other platforms.

Wings and fins pretty much all behave the same. Or so says science. Image from Nature Communications.

News from CD-adapco

• The technical program for the STAR Global Conference 2014 is now online
• The 15th Annual Internal Combustion Engine Workshop will be held in Plymouth, Michigan on 11 April 2014.
• STAR-CCM+ v9.02 was released. The software supports volume rendering for improved realism, adjoint solver improvements to help with throughput, and a new dispersed multiphase model for improved efficiency.
• Read their blog post about v9.02.
• ENGINEERING.com wrote about the new realism in STAR-CCM+ v9.02.

STAR-CCM+ v9.02 includes tumble and swirl cost functions for the adjoint solver targeted at internal combustion engine simulations. Image from CD-adapco.

Events

• The 23rd International Meshing Roundtable, themed Mesh Modeling for Simulation and Visualization, will be held 12-15 October 2014 in London. The call for papers for this year’s conference is open with a due date for full papers of 02 June.
• Mark your calendar: the NAFEMS World Congress 2015 will be held on 21-24 June 2015 in San Diego.
• The 2nd Symposium on OpenFOAM in Wind Energy will be held on 19-21 May 2014 in Boulder, CO.
• The Femap Symposium 2014 will be held 14-16 May in conjunction with Solid Edge University in Atlanta.

Miscellania

• SpaceClaim Engineer 2014 was released with performance improvements, a web-hosted model viewer, 3D PDF support, and much more.
• Kitware’s VTK has been accepted for the 2014 Google Summer of Code program.
• A few words on simulation data management.
• Congratulations to FYFD on their 1,000th post and to Nicole for successfully defending her PhD dissertation.
• The SolidNotes blog offers a checklist for successful simulations. (Note: geared toward FEA.)

Reticulation on Canvas

Laura Watt is another artist whose work “explores the possibilities of abstract content as found in pattern and color.” It just proves that you never know where mesh generation will turn up. [“Nobody expects the mesh generation!”]

Laura Watt, Memory Tool, 2007

Don’t believe me? I read a lot of stuff online and recently came across Kelly Norton’s blog (design + engineering) and emailed him about the banner image on a recent post.

Image from Kelly Norton’s blog.

Not surprisingly, when I emailed him about the significance of this mesh he told me I was the first person to ever ask.  Here’s how he creates it:

1. Generate N random points in 2D from a uniform source.
2. Compute a Delaunay triangulation of those points.
3. Pick a random color palette from a set of “good” palettes I have lying around.
4. Render the triangles selecting the color of each triangle by mapping it’s position onto the color palette (colors from the palette are also assigned to the background and the stroke).