Altair: Altair Technologies and FluiDyna are collaborating on GPU-accelerated CFD. On a related note, Altair will be the exclusive worldwide reseller of the nanoFluidX technology.
ANSYS: ANSYS was recognized at The Engineering Simulation Show for its quality, innovation, and financial performance as company of the year. Also, the company’s GAAP revenue for Q1 was $218 million, up 1%.
arterial disease: CFD aids in the diagnosis and risk assessment of coronary artery disease.
AutoCAD: The Engineers Guide to Drinks was created 1972 on a lark to test plotters. It found new life recently (download the DWG file here) and is now being converted to 3D.
The Engineers Guide to Drinks. Drawn in AutoCAD. Image from Between the Lines blog. See links above.
Beta CAE: ANSA v15.2.4 was released.
CAD: The worldwide CAD market in 2014 was $8 billion and is expected to grow with a CAGR of 4% through 2017.
CAE Associates: Structural finite element modeling came to rescue of Adam, a marble statue by Tullio Lombardo (1460-1532), that fell and broke into 28 large pieces and an uncountable number of fragments in 2002. FEA helped assure museum curators that the repairs (pins and glue) would work while also being reversible if needed.
FEA contributed to the repair of Tullio Lombardo’s Adam. Image from CAE Associates. See link above.
Caelus: Version 5.04 of Caelus is available for download.
CD-adapco: In case you missed the event, pretend you were there with CD-adapco’s STAR Global Conference 2015 photo gallery. Or you could read Monica Schnitger’s summary of the event. In which you’ll learn what STAR stands for.
COMSOL: Comsol Multiphysics 5.1 was released.
cycling: CFD is used to design bicycling helmets.
Dalton: Project Dalton, 1D flow analysis, from Autodesk Labs remains free for a bit longer.
drilling: Los Alamos performed CFD simulations of offshore drilling rigs.
CFD simulation performed by Los Alamos to study vortex induced motion on offshore drilling rigs. Image from Int’l Science Grid This Week. See link above.
Edwin, Colin: Musician Colin Edwin (Porcupine Tree, Metallic Taste of Blood, O.R.k.) released a new digital-only EP titled Mesh. [I am a big fan of Colin’s music and am using his album’s title as an excuse to post here. It’s my blog after all.]
Mesh by Colin Edwin. Image from Colin Edwin’s blog. See link above.
EnSight: CEI asks whether 32-bit support is still wanted for EnSight beginning in 2016. Also, there’s now a data converter from EMSolution to EnSight.
ESI: The ESI Group acquired the assets of Ciespace, the cloud-based CFD provider. Ciespace will [already has?] begun integrating ESI’s software into Ciespace’s open, web-services platform. Monica Schnitger shared her thoughts on this deal.
exhaust: CFD is being used to design intake and exhaust systems for surface ships.
Flow Science: FLOW-3D News was published for Spring 2015. Also, speakers were announced for their European Users Conference.
Ford: A CFD Engineer is sought by Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, MI.
GrabCAD: Read about multi-disciplinary 3D design.
Hex: A frontal approach to hex-dominant mesh generation by Baudouin et al.
Cutaway view of a hex-dominant mesh for a filter mount using the method by Baudouin et al. Image from Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Services. See link above.
Hi-Tech: Three ways to get value from your CFD when you use it as a precursor to prototype tests. #1 Measure things you can’t measure with a test.
Indy 500: Honda’s aero kit for their Indy car chassis was developed using CFD.
Leap CFD: A hybrid RANS-LES approach was used to model flow over terrain and an urban environment as part of a wind engineering study related to energy harvesting. [Be certain to watch the video.]
ANSYS CFD simulation of flow over an urban environment. Image from Leap CFD. See link above.
LearnCAx: CCTech launched free CFD education via their massive open online course LearnCAx.
LimitState: The latest version of LimitState:FIX is available for repairing 3D faceted geometry for 3D printing.
mantle: Princeton researchers used adjoint methods to study seismic wave propagation through the earth to map its non-uniformity.
Seismic wave speeds below the Pacific ocean. Red is slower, blue is faster. Image from International Science Grid This Week. See link above.
Mentor Graphics: Read about calibration of electronics thermal simulation models.
MeshUp: The Kickstarter campaign for this tool for a “3D modeling mashup tool for meshes” is now in beta.
MeshUp is a Kickstarter-funded mashup tool for meshes. Image from Kickstarter. See link above. [Do not question why you’d want to mashup the Utah teapot and the Stanford bunny.]
NASA: If you can demonstrate a 1000x speed-up of a CFD solution over FUN3D NASA may award you $500,000. [An “X-Prize” for CFD? Hell yes. [Note: X-Prize is probably someone’s trademark so forgive the usage.]] There’s a link at the site to NASA’s request for information as they try to decide whether to pull the trigger on this idea.
news: TenLinks and ENGINEERING.com have merged.
NUMECA: NUMECA‘s CFD software is being used to help Oracle Team USA prepare for the Americas Cup.
Octree: Advances in parallelization of large scale oct-tree mesh generation by O’Connell and Karman.
Onshape: Onshape beta is reviewed by DEVELOP3D.
PADT: CoresOnDemand.com, an HPC resource for ANSYS users, was launched by PAD-T. [I can’t help getting hungry for Thai food every time I see PADT come up in the news.]
PyFR: Version 0.8.0 of PyFR was released.
ReFRESCO-Operation: MARIN’s ReFRESCO-Operation is a partnership with clients for marine applications of CFD using the ReFRESCO CFD code and MARIN’s compute cluster.
SimuTech Group: ANSYS designated SimuTech Group as an Elite Channel Partner. SimuTech is said to be the largest full-service provider of ANSYS’s CAE software in North America.
SolidWorks: Here’s a checklist for running SolidWorks Flow Simulation.
SpaceX: Watch this video of a GPU-based simulation of SpaceX’s rocket engine.
Symscape: CFD for unconventional designs.
Tech Soft 3D: Tech Soft 3D announced the new HOOPS Cloud Platform and HOOPS Desktop Platform.
Tecplot: In the 4th installment of their “trillion cell challenge,” Tecplot describes their approach to the input/output bottleneck when visualizing massive computational simulations. See also their 300 billion cell results.
Performance improvement of the latest version of Tecplot versus previous versions for handling massive datasets. Image from Tecplot. See link above.
TotalCAE: Billing themselves as the “IT department for CFD engineers,” TotalCAE offers a number of products including a private cloud, turnkey HPC cluster with support for all popular CFD solvers.
V&V: Tony Abbey explains verification and validation for FEA in Desktop Engineering.
wind turbine: CFD simulation of a floating offshore wind turbine.
Wirth Research: F-1 designer Nick Wirth’s team used CFD to design an aerodynamic package for Scania R-series trucks that reduces drag by 10% relative to other add-on kits.
6SigmaET: Future Facilities’ CFD solver 6SigmaET was awarded Product of the Year at the Engineering Simulation Awards Show.
Stellar – Meshed – Caves
Artist Julien Salaud‘s 3D, immersive, polygonal, sculptures are made from thread that’s illuminated by UV light. The result is like walking through the craziest mesh you’ve ever generated. See more at This is Colossal.
Julien Salaud, Stellar Caves. Image from Colossal.
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It seems like a 1000x speed up is worth much more than $500K. Just the amount of hardware cost saved is tremendous. And $500K is only about 1-2 man years of work, when accounting for contractor overhead, profit, etc. (Assuming the labor rate multiple for a contractor is still about 2.9). But, if someone can and is willing to do it, that would be awesome. But I suspect they could sell the intellectual property to someone else for a lot more.
BTW, a business idea for Pointwise. Pointwise could investigate the feasibility of gathering some investors together to offer a $500K prize for a 10x speedup over the state of the art (whatever that is) as long as Pointwise is required as the means to generate the grid. And, of course, Pointwise/Investors get a portion of the profits from licensing the CFD code. I’m guessing that $500K over a few years would probably be easy to recoup.
Hi Martin. Thanks for the feedback. I hadn’t seen the biz angle before. Also, you should share your comment with NASA. What are you thinking? $2 million?
The implications of a 1000x speed up are tremendous, so I’m thinking the worth of that IP is at least a few hundred million dollars. However, protecting that IP may be challenging, so that number may be high. I don’t know. Anyway, IMO, the worth of that top prize should be at least $10M. And that would be an absolute bargain for the government.
I Googled the cost of a supercomputer, and came up with this. I used this, in part, to justify my numbers. (6-7million just for powering Sequoia per year. And that does not include maintenance and administration. And, $100M-$250M for designing and building.)
http://techland.time.com/2012/06/19/what-exactly-is-a-supercomputer/