News

• Students have until next Friday (15 July) to apply for the HPC for Undergraduates program at SC16 (aka Supercomputing).
• Certainly someone’s CFD visualization is a good candidate for this year’s Information is Beautiful Awards. Nominees due by 16 September.
• Online video tutorials can make CAD and meshing easier. [I wonder what the URL of this article implies?]

Symscape makes the case for wacky CFD. Image from Symscape. Click image for article.

Software

• [At the risk of being a jerk], the article 7 Challenges CFD Engineers Face and How They Can be Solved with the Use of Simulation Tools leaves me scratching my head. For example, #3 is Presenting Data to a Non-Technical Audience – which truly is a challenge – mentions “appealing display” and “colours [sic] or contours.” I’ll propose that non-technical consumers of simulation results need to receive data in the same form as any other engineering data; presented as performance maps in the vernacular of the application domain. [Every time this issue comes up I’m reminded of the “machine that goes ping.”]
• How does cloud-based software address the issues of crashes and data loss? [Can’t we address this on the desktop too?]
• Beta CAE announced the release of v16.2.1 of their software suite.
• Frustrum announced the beta of the new Generate software that promises to integrate design and topology optimization.
• Looking for free, open source, 3D CAD? 3D CAD World lists several options for you.

Applications

Sample simulation of a Jaguar vehicle using Exa’s software. Image from imeche.org. See link below.

• Jaguar Land Rover hopes to fully verify vehicle performance using simulation by the year 2020 with the help of Exa.
• CFD and combustion modeling from the viewpoint of Convergent Science; faster software, direct chemistry computation, and more.
• Heat sink design using CFD from Software Cradle.
• There’s a nice video on this page illustrating CFD for data center cooling.

Structured and Unstructured Art

Serendipity led me to London’s Jessica Carlisle gallery where I found artists exploring both structured and unstructured grid motifs.

Vera Boele-Keimer explores (dis)order, and searches for a balance between stability and fragility – as though she’s generated structured grids before.

Vera Boele Keimer, Woodblock (Blue, Green, Yellow), 2012. Image from Jessica Carlisle Gallery. Click image for source.

Katrina Blannin, on the other hand, goes for the unstructured mesh motif through works that are rule-based (Delaunay?) yet allow her to explore tonal variations that produce visual rhythms. The work shown below looks like it could be a screen shot from Pointwise.

Katrina Blannin, Double Hexad Black Naples, 2013. Image from Jessica Carlisle Gallery. Click image for source.

Bonus: Alert reader Tessa Uroic found the structured grid below IRL in Porto, Portugal.