Software

• CD-adapco’s research into two-phase piping flow has entered phase 2.
• In other CD-adapco news, surface repair in STAR-CCM+ has been reworked for improved usability.
• Users of Caedium will likely be interested in this article about techniques for controlling your simulation.
• OpenCFD released OpenFOAM for Windows.

Screen capture from a video illustrating a transient simulation of a screw compressor from CFX-Berlin. Click image for video.

Events

• CONSELF (“consulting for yourself”) launched their cloud-based CFD SaaS.
• Proceedings from the recent FLOW-3D Users Conference are now available online for you to download and read. (Registration required.)
• The 4th International Conference on Computational Methods for Thermal Problems (ThermaComp) will be held 6-8 July 2016 at Georgia Tech.
• The 9th International Conference on CFD will be held 11-15 July 2016 in Instanbul.

Applications

• CFD has been used a lot to make ships more efficient, but caution should be exercised when reducing the ship’s available power.
• The University of Exeter has an available PhD studentship in the area of CFD for hydrodynamic scour.

Temperatures around a burner diffuser as computed by ANSYS Fluent. Image from Desktop Engineering. Click image for article.

Meshes, Conferences, and Art

I wouldn’t want you to think I was fibbing when I wrote earlier this month about combining art viewing with conference travel. So let me share what I was able to discover during my recent visit to Austin, Texas for the 24th International Meshing Roundtable.

At Austin’s The Contemporary at Laguna Gloria, I thought that Monika Sosnowska’s The stairs looked like turbomachines having a bad day.

Monika Sosnowska, The stairs, 2011.

The Blanton Museum on the campus of U.T. Austin is a hidden gem and I urge everyone to visit it during your next visit. The aerospace engineers in the audience might enjoy Paul Villinski’s butterfly-powered aircraft, Passage.

Paul Villinski, Passage, 2011

Simply by chance I wandered into a commercial gallery and found some ceramics by James Aarons. Anyone who’s meshed the airfoil can probably figure out why I bought Pierce Twice (glazed graphite on ceramic). I haven’t yet found a place to hang it on the wall.

James Aarons, Pierce Twice, 2008.

For the record, please note that despite repeatedly stating that I’m not a fan of sculpture (i.e. it doesn’t move me like painting does), I just shared three pieces of sculpture (although the 3rd is half drawing, half sculpture).