News from ANSYS

• ANSYS has acquired “the assets of” Newmerical Technologies, with special emphasis on Newmerical’s special expertise on aircraft icing simulations including FENSAP-ICE. [Congratulations to Wagdi Habashi and his team.]
• From the “better late than never department” comes proof via ANSYS that a 2 psi difference in football inflation has a negligible effect on the ball’s gripability.
• ANSYS and the University of Stuttgart have partnered on providing access to CFD on HPC.

Screen capture from an ANSYS video illustrating negligible grip changes due to ball inflation. Click image for video. See article link above.

New Things

• 3Dconnexion introduced the 3-button CadMouse [which should also be good enough for meshing and CFD].
• The T-Splines v4 plugin for Rhino is now available.
• RealFlow 2015 is coming soon – here are a few sneak peek videos.
• Voith designed the new linear jet marine propulsion system exclusively on the computer using CFD.
• Flow Science published FLOW-3D News for Winter 2015.
• The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics announced their 2015 class of Fellows which includes Kansas’ Z.J. Wang, proponent of high order CFD methods. Congratulations to all. [I wish Z.J. would blog more.]

Event and Jobs

• SIGGRAPH 2015 will be held 9-13 August 2015 in Los Angeles.
• Austria’s Graz University of Technology invites applications for an Endowed Professorship in CFD.
• GE seeks a CFD Engineer for their facility in Turkey.

The Cloud

• Autodesk announced that all new commercial seats of their stand-alone desktop software will be licensed by a subscription model as opposed to perpetual licensing. This has nothing to do with the cloud.
• On the other hand, this has everything to do with the cloud. 3D CAD World spoke with OnShape’s Jon Hirschtick about CAD in the cloud (without saying anything about OnShape’s upcoming product(s)). The benefits of cloud-based solutions are nothing to download, nothing to install, use on virtually any computer, and “ease of use.” [You may infer that I don’t necessarily see a direct tie between the cloud and ease of use.]

News from CD-adapco

• CD-adapco revealed the list of accepted presentations for the STAR Global Conference 2015 (San Diego, 16-18 March).
• Learn more about the Dr. Mesh Genius Award at this event where you get 2 hours to write a macro for STAR-CCM+.

Coming in STAR-CCM+ v10: adjoint-based mesh adaption. Image from CD-adapco. Click image for article.

The History of Engineering Design Tools

Add this to your “to read” list. On the SolidWorks blog you’ll find The History of Engineering Design Tools.

• Engineering 1.0 (1760-1970) [Even though I was only 8 years old in 1970, I got to use the methods described in this article in shop class in junior high school and a little bit of engineering drafting as a college freshman. I still have rulers, curves, protractors, and symbol templates in my desk drawer.]
• Engineering 2.0 (1970-1995) during which engineering tools moved from the drawing board to the computer. [This is how I began my career, during the last half of this period. Engineering 1.5?]
• Engineering 3.0 (1985-2015) which gave us 3D CAD, simulation, and PDM.
• Engineering 4.0, the so-called “next engineering paradigm,” is presented in terms of a recorded video and infographic.

The Art of Turbulence

What does Van Gogh’s Starry Night have to do with turbulent flow? Watch this 5 minute TED-Ed video to find out.

Screen capture from a video that relates Van Gogh’s Starry Night to the turbulence in a fluid.