Special Easter Weekend Edition

• Must read: Now available via the NASA technical reports server is CFD Vision 2030 Study: A Path to Revolutionary Computational Aerosciences.
• Good advice: How engineers can communicate better (from 3Dconnexion).
• From the Pointwise newsroom:
  • We released Pointwise V17.2 which extends the T-Rex hybrid meshing technique so that layers of hex cells are created in near-wall and near-wake regions.
  • The Call for Papers is now open for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2014 to be held 29-30 October in Anaheim, California. Abstracts are due by 18 July.

CFD simulation of automotive paint curing. Simulation and image from Convergent Science.

• CATIA users: the COE 2014 Annual PLM Conference & Technifair is coming up soon on 27-30 April in Anaheim.
• Altair owes MSC about $26 million after a jury found they misappropriated source code, concepts, and processes from MSC.
• Convergent Science shares a CFD simulation of an automotive paint bake oven.
• TFTPad, TFTLabs’ free 3D viewer for models from their gallery, is now available for iOS. [Later we can discuss why I download these 3D CAE apps and delete them a couple of weeks later without ever having used them.]
• Which brings us to GrabCAD’s article about the best mobile apps for engineers.
• And engineers might enjoy the videos on the SciShow YouTube channel.
• Australia’s CSIRO is using ocean modeling as part of the search for MH370.
• Scan&Solve 2014 Beta for Rhino remains free until June 18.
• Beta CAE released ANSA/μETA v14.2.5.
• CAELinux 2013 has been released.
• CFD contributes significantly to the goal of achieving a ground speed of 1,000 mph in the Bloodhound SSC.

The Bloodhound supersonic car may truly be the most exciting and dynamic engineering challenge going on today. Judging by this picture from The Economic Times, one of the challenges is 1980s vintage CFD of an airplane flying in a tube. (This is the mainstream media reporting on science.)

• The SolidWorks folks make the case that the question of whether simulation should be performed by analysts or designers is irrelevant – engineers should conduct simulations.
• ParaView has a new settings UI.
• Here’s a nice video from Flow Science of contaminant dispersion in a stream.
• And an upcoming release of Caedium CFD will feature passive species transport.
• The abstract deadline for the 2nd OpenFOAM User Conference is 30 June.
• And the abstract deadline for the 14th FLOW-3D European Users Conference is 25 April.
• It’s time for the Academic STAR Simulation Contest and entries are due by 31 May.
• NVIDIA awarded graduate fellowships to PhD students who will be doing using GPUs for some interesting applications.

3D Printed Voronoi Polyhedra

I could not pass up this image from Pinterest of work by Michiel Cornelissen of a 3D Voronoi structure done using Grasshopper and MeshMixer for 3D printing.

3D Voronoi structure by Michiel Cornelissen

[Which reminds me that we should really finish tweaking the 3D printing plugin for Pointwise that lets you print your mesh.]