Events

• CD-adapco blogged about how their customers are taking full advantage of their software in simulation and first thing cited is automation. The article was written based on activities at their recent STAR Global Conference and includes a link to some of the presentations.
• Desktop Engineering also published part 2 of their take-aways from the STAR Global Conference.
• CONSELF has scheduled a series of webinars in April and May covering topics from valve and pipe flow to wind tunnels.
• Ford, Cummins, and CIMdata will deliver keynotes at May’s modeFRONTIER International Users Meeting.
• You can attend the CFD Certificate Workshop at Toronto’s North York College of Information and Technology on 16 April 2016.
• The 2016 Beta CAE Nordic Open Meeting is coming up soon on 05 April in Gothenburg.

Award-winning visualization of a FLOW-3D simulation of contaminant dispersion. (Very cool.) Image from Flow Science. Click image for article and video.

People

• Tech Clarity wants to learn how leading companies are empowering design engineers with simulation. Take their 10 minute survey and maybe win an Amazon gift card.
• On a similar note, ENGINEERING.com summarized January’s Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Summit (ASSESS) by citing five strategies for expanding the use of simulation: democratization, confidence, cost reduction, broader integration, and research coordination.
• The CAD Society announced recipients of its annual awards.
  • Blake Courter received the Peter Marks Pioneer Award
  • David Cohn received the Joe Grecco Community Award
  • Peter Schroer received the Leadership Award
  • Lifetime Achievement Award to be announced at next month’s COFES
• The Automotive Research Center in Indianapolis is hiring a CFD Engineer.
• Episode 4 of the Talking CFD podcast with SimScale’s David Heiny is now online.
• The global CFD market is forecasted to grow 13.6% through 2019.
• Exa’s financial performance is strong, with Q4 results up 8% and license revenue up 14%.

Applications & Software

Screen capture from a video showing a simulation of gear lubrication done using TwinMesh and CFX. Image from twinmesh.com. Click image for article and video.

• CFD for automotive aerodynamics in India’s growing car market.
• CD-adapco launched STAR-Cast v11.02 with a new high pressure die casting module.
• Space’s CFD Launch Simulation Challenge may be the most informal CFD challenge I’ve seen yet.
• New to CFD? Check out cfMesh’s CFD for Beginners.
• The Vulkan 1.0 specification was released for “cross-platform access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs.”
• See how you can link simulation cases in EnSight.

What’s New at Pointwise

• Join us for a webinar on 05 April with Tecplot, Standford’s SU2 team, and Stanford’s Solar Car team on how CFD simulation helped them improve their car’s aerodynamic efficiency.
• You can learn about mesh generation using Pointwise at our training course in Fort Worth on 12-14 April.
• If you’re at the SAE World Congress, please come hear us present our work on Meshing Considerations for Automotive Shape Design Optimization.
• Your CFD and meshing work will make a great presentation at the Pointwise User Group Meeting. The call for papers is open with a due date of 01 July.

See what happens when you set off a firecracker indoors. Simulation by Caelus. Click link for video.

Rivers of Facets

As mentioned previously, I enjoy the little moments when two of my interests intersect. In this case, Walt Disney World’s new Rivers of Light show at their Animal Kingdom Park has given their floating lanterns a “rustic minimalism” through the use of lights and a faceted style.

Screen capture from a Disney Imagineering video showing how the floating lanterns from the new Rivers of Light attraction were created. Click image for video on Facebook.

Question of the Week: How Many Decimals do You Use for Pi?

JPL wrote about why their most precise calculations use 3.141592653589793 for pi. How many do you use in your CFD code? Does anyone actually hard-code the number? Or do you just compute it using a fundamental equation and store it in whatever floating point or double precision variable is consistent with the rest of your code?