News from Pointwise

• At the end of his presentation at AIAA Aviation 2015 on the evolution of Pointwise’s T-Rex hybrid meshing technique, Dr. John Steinbrenner showed what he called “gratuitous pictures of grids” because grids will soon be invisible if the CFD Vision 2030 Study turns out to be true. To ensure that we all can ogle grids all day every day, we’ve launched the Wallpaper Contest. Submit your best-looking mesh images formatted for use as desktop wallpaper, we’ll vote, and the winner gets a box of goodies in addition to being downloaded the world over. Every entrant gets a t-shirt.
• There are plenty of upcoming training courses from Pointwise, including new 1-day courses on advanced topics.
  • 15-17 September = Glyph Scripting
  • 07 October = Advanced Structured Meshing
  • 20-22 October = Pointwise Standard Training
  • 10 November = Advanced Glyph Scripting
  • and more
• Come visit with us at these upcoming conferences:
  • 15-17 September = Metacomp Symposium
  • 12-14 October = International Meshing Roundtable
  • 22-24 November = American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting

Your Weekend Reading

• Communications of the ACM (Vol 58 No 8) has an excellent article on Learning Through Computational Complexity (registration required).
• Software Development Times magazine calls Exercises in Programming Style the best programming book of the past decade.

Computing and Events

• SGI is fully onboard with the recently announced National Strategic Computing Initiative which calls for a 30x speed-up in capability.
• HPC Wire compares the NSCI to the U.S. Lunar program in the 1960s.
• NAFEMS is hosting a seminar on Engineering Analysis and Simulation in the Aerospace Industry on 06 October 2015 in Montreal.

Visualization

• The most significant developments in visualization during the first half of 2015 according to Visualizing Data.
• Intelligent Light and Applied CCM cooperated on the use of FieldView to visualize the results of an OpenFOAM simulation of  V8 Supercar external aerodynamics. See image below, see video at the link.

Surface pressure and streamlines are shown in this FieldView image of an OpenFOAM simulation. Image from Intelligent Light. See link above.

Software

• Just in time for the start of the academic year comes ANSYS Student, a free introductory CFD package for 64-bit Windows platforms that’s only limited by problem size (512,000 cells/nodes).
  • Read more about this announcement on DEVELOP3D.
  • Read more about this announcement on ENGINEERING.com.
• NASA has put their CFD Utility Software Library on Source Forge. The 30 libraries and 100 applications cover a wide range of functionality.

Applications

• “It is an imperfect science, CFD is.” A flaw in computer simulations (leaving out important details?) led to poor results for NASCAR’s Rousch Fenway Racing team. [Mind what you have learned. Save you it can.]
• Luxury yachts benefit from the use of CFD – in this case, X-Flow.
• But as imperfect as it may be, CFD can solve critical problems of the day such as this use of FloEFD to guide hand placement for hot air hand dryers. Before clicking through to read the results guess what works better: horizontal, vertical, or rotating hand position. [Here’s some related content:]
  • Related 1
  • Related 2
  • Related 3 [The best option]
  • Related 4

Screen capture from a video of a FloEFD simulation of hand drying. Color indicates film thickness, red to blue where blue is dry skin. See link above.

Serenity in Meshing

This image of Jack Tworkov’s Alternative IX landed in my inbox this week via an announcement for Jack Tworkov Mark and Grid 1931-1982, an exhibition coming next month to Alexander Gray Associates. As soon as I saw this image I knew I had to share it here. I find it to be a serene balance of calmness and motion, a feeling we often don’t get from a mesh.

Jack Tworkov, Alternative IX, 1978. Image from Alexander Gray Associates. See link above.

Without making it seem like a stretch, I find many parallels between mesh generation and Tworkov’s approach to painting. In no particular order:

• Tworkov felt a bit alienated and blazed his own unique trail in painting. He’s quoted as saying “Style is the effect of pressure.”
• He wanted to break away from abstract expressionism’s overt focus on the subjective and wanted instead to be more objective in his approach, similar to how we strive to move meshing from an art to a science.
• His works rely heavily on geometry and mathematics but retain a very human touch. “The limits impose a kind of order, but the range of unexpected possibilities is infinite” he said. What we say is “form is liberating.”

P.S. Sorry about the digression with the hand dryers.