Special Easter Weekend Edition

Pre- & Post-Processing

• The importance of mesh density in Abaqus.
• Here’s best of the visualization web for February 2015.
• Learn how to debug EnSight Python scripts by watching this video about windpdb.

The interaction of a rotorcraft with a ship’s airwake. CFD by Kestrel, viz by FieldView. Image from Intelligent Light. Click image for article.

Applications & Reading

• Direct Numerical Simulation of Flow and Acoustic Fields Around an Air-Reed Instrument with Tone Holes. [How many of you played one of these instruments in elementary school? I did.]
• The IMA Conference on Numerical Methods for Simulation will be held 1-4 September 2015 at the University of Oxford.
• Springer introduced the book Engineering Applications of Computational Fluid Dynamics edited by Shaari and Awang.
• CFD Direct shares this article about tensor mathematics.

Flow and acoustic contours through a recorder. Application by Yamaha, image from the paper cited above.

Business & Dollars

• Exa‘s reported solid growth: 11% in Q4 (Nov-Jan) relative to the previous year, up 13% for the year to $61 million.
• ANSYS and OCF are selling turnkey CFD clusters in the UK that include Lenovo hardware, Linux OS, and ANSYS CFD.
• Mentor Graphics’ Keith Hanna shows that the aggregate annual CFD business now exceeds $1 billion.

Screen capture from a video of a combustion simulation. Application by SpaceX, video hosted by Nvidia. Click image for link to original article.

Synthesizing Structure & Chaos

That certainly is an apt metaphor for CFD mesh generation: providing a synthetic structure on which the chaos of turbulent fluid motion is to be computed.

Don Sorenson, Untitled #19, 1974

From his website, artist Don Sorenson‘s work is described thusly:

“Formally, his paintings are amalgams of the polar opposites with which large stylistic swings in the history of art have been described: intellect and emotion, order and randomness, control and accident, structure and chaos, straight line and amorphous color, gloss and matte, literal flatness and illusionistic depth, figure and ground and so forth. It is through a synthesis of art history that Sorenson finds his unique place in the world of contemporary art.”