News

• OnShape, the new CAD company founded by SolidWorks’ founders, has a new blog and it kicked off with a post on why they’re starting from scratch again. Reason #5 is that they want to make CAD fun again. They’re also collecting names of folks who want to try a pre-production version of their product.
• Fodder for debate: Do elite software developers exist?
• Engility has an open position for a PETTT/HPC Program Manager in Virginia.
• How do you assess CFD convergence? Do you use residuals, degree of conservation, and quantities of interest?
• Consulting firm Beyond CAE has updated their website.

Congratulations to our friends at CD-adapco for their image on the cover of the January 2015 issue of Aerospace America which features a cover story on CFD.

Events

• The 15th European Turbulence Conference 2015 will be held on 25-28 August 2015 in Delft, The Netherlands. (The call for papers is already closed.)
• MeshTrends 10, The Symposium on Trends in Unstructured Mesh Generation, will be colocated with the 13th U.S. National Conference on Computational Mechanics, to be held in San Diego on 26-30 July. Abstract submission is open until 15 February.
• Keynote speakers for SolidWorks World 2015 have been announced and include celebrity physicist Dr. Michio Kaku.

Software

• Tecplot announced two software releases:
  • Tecplot 360 EX 2015 Release 1
  • Tecplot RS 2014 Release 2
• BETA CAE Systems released ANSA v15.2.1.

Applications

Screen capture from the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison’s winning entry in the ANSYS 2015 Hall of Fame Competition. Image from ANSYS. Click image for video and details.

• ANSYS announced the winners of their 2015 Hall of Fame Competition. One of the academic winners, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, simulated a swimming sea turtle. See image above.
• Modeling gas turbine enclosures with CFD.
• Intelligent Light shares a case study in which the FieldView XDB capability in the VisIt software allowed for in-situ visualization of Kestrel CFD results.
• CFD, specifically Mentor Graphics’ FloEFD, is contributing to understanding the thermal environment within LED car headlights. See image below.
• Here’s a case study from Software Cradle on the use of CFD on motorcycles.
• With a desired reliability of 99.999%, datacenters must be effectively and efficiently cooled. CFD has become a best practice in understanding this thermal environment.

Top view of a car headlight showing temperature distribution and flow streamlines. Image from ElectronicsWeekly.com. See link above.

Dancing With Your Mesh

This week I share with you not one, not two, but THREE fun, visual, mesh-like experiences.

Hakanaï is a dance performance featuring interaction between the dancer and projected digital images. Quoting directly from the artists’ (Adrien M  / Claire B) website, “In Japanese Hakanaï denotes that which is temporary and fragile, evanescent and transient, and in this case something set between dreams and reality.” To a certain degree, one might say this is an apt description of mesh generation. Watch the video.

Hakanai by Adrien M and Claire B. Screen capture of video of dance performance. Click image for website. 

H OM E OMOR PH ISM is a audio/video projection based on the abstraction of natural forms into primitive geometry, inspired by the topology and landscape of New Mexico. Think of it as a distillation of the geometric information contained in natural images. Watch this video too.

H OM E OMOR PH ISM_Dome A/V Performance. Click link for video.

And finally, what else would you do with reclaimed wood other than use it to make mesh-like geometric installations? That’s precisely what Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels does with her site-specific installations.

Reclaimed wood crystalline installation by Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels. Image from Visual News.