Software

• My nomination for best new CFD code name of the year so far: Chombo-Crunch.
• Code_Saturne 4.0 is now available for download.

Berkeley researchers introduced CFD and reactive transport code Chombo-Crunch. Image from LBL.gov. Click image for article.

Meshing

• What’s Next for CFD in which 11 industry experts and yours truly are asked “What is holding CFD back?” Hint: “All about the mesh.”
• The RhinoPolyhedra plugin has been updated.
• Air Meshes for Robust Collision Handling

The T.MAP plugin for Rhino (beta release) is available from EvoluteTools. Image from evolute.at. Click image for announcement.

 CAD

• Autodesk’s AnyCAD allows full associativity and automatic updates between other CAD systems and Inventor.
• Desktop Engineer’s Kenneth Wong shares his thoughts on simulation appification in this video.
• Beyond PLM compares Onshape to “Google Drive for CAD.”

Applications

• ESI made a move into the electronics cooling market with their acquisition of PRESTO.

Lenovo used FloTHERM to simulate cooling inside their ThinkStation products. Image from Desktop Engineering. Click image for article.

Viz

• Tecplot 360 EX 2015 R2 is now available.
• Kitware introduced a new Paraview feature: quartile chart view.
• Here’s the best of the visualization web for March 2015.

Computing

Illustration of adaptive mesh sampling from the paper Power Particles: An Incompressible Fluid Flow Solver Based On Power Diagrams by de Goes et al. Image from Cal Tech. Click image for full paper.

• DEVELOP3D shares information on ANSYS Enterprise Cloud which is based on Amazon Web Services.
• STAR-CCM+ was run on 55,000 cores while exhibiting “perfect” scalability. On a related note, read about CD-adapco’s history of supercomputing.
• The folks at Siemens PLM Software write about CAE automation.

Events

Spray drying with CFD. Image from ChemEurope.com. Click image for article.

• For your reading pleasure: Libre Mechanics, “open knowledge on engineering development.”
• Beta CAE announced the agenda for their upcoming international conference.
• Two upcoming courses fromERCOFTAC:
  • Transition Modeling in Munich on 21-22 May 2015
  • Design Optimization: Methods and Applications in Stockholm on 28-29 May 2015

A Meshed Hat

Chris Johanson, My Funny Hat, 2011. Click image for source.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s blog delves a little bit and only tangentially into a topic that I’m a bit interested in. Namely the proliferation of faceting (aka reticulation) in modern painting (i.e. triangles are trendy). As a case in point they reference the work of Chris Johanson and his imitators.