Meshing
- Envenio shares five advantages of structured grids. #4 High Degree of Control. [For more than you probably ever want to know about Pointwise’s implementation of structured grid techniques read Quality and Control – Two Reasons Why Structured Grids Aren’t Going Away in the Mar/Apr 2013 issue of The Connector.]
- CONSELF describes four mesh issues that cause inaccuracy. #3 [Lack of] Orthogonality.
- Symscape advises us never to settle for faceted geometry when NURBS are available. [I personally am shocked by the number of people who simply assumed they were identical in performance.] [For a quick read on this topic, see Analytic vs. Discrete Geometry in the Sep/Oct 2012 issue of The Connector.]
- Guess how many times meshing and preprocessing are mentioned in a study of FEA simulation bottlenecks.
- Working with mesh data in Autodesk Inventor 2017.

Sample PowerFLOW simulation of a DENSO thermal component. See link to article below.
Applications
- Exa announced a collaboration with DENSO by which the latter will compile a database of validated PowerFLOW simulations of their thermal products for their customers. See image above.
- See also this cool Exa video [only 5 sec.] of a turbofan simulation.
- CFD is used to study the ventilation of parking garages.
- Data center cooling requires a keen awareness of air movement and CEI’s EnSight can help with that. See image below.

Temperature profiles in a data center visualized in EnSight. Image from CEI. See link above.
Events
- The Call for Submissions is now open for GTC 2017, the GPU Technology Conference.
- The Marine Institute of the Netherlands (MARIN) is offering a course on CFD for maritime applications this November. [The little marketer in me is wondering why these fine folks don’t use “MARINe” as the short version of their name.]
- DEVELOP3D LIVE is coming to the USA for the first time on 26 September in Boston.
- The 7th Beta CAE International Conference will be held in Greece on 30 May – 01 June 2017.
Software
- ANSYS v17.2 was released.
- Targeting CAD for vertical applications.
- Beta CAE suite v16.2.2 was released.
- CD-adapco re-committed to internal combustion engine simulation.
- ThermoAnalytics v12.2 is now available.
- Ceetron is going to support Oculus Rift for CFD simulation visualization.
- Scan&Solve beta for Rhino is now available.
News

PyFR simulation of flow over low-pressure turbine blades. See link below for article an uncropped image. Image from Phys.org.
- NASA’s PubSpace is where you’ll be able to find for free “any NASA-funded research articles in peer-reviewed journals” within one year of publication.
- Why do so many women leave engineering? Regarding an internship, one female participant wrote this: “The environment was creepy, with older weirdo man engineers hitting on me all the time and a sexist infrastructure was in place that kept female interns shuffling papers…”
- Analysts forecast the global cloud CFD market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10.73% during the period 2016-2020. [Too bad. If it was going to grow at 10.75% I was going all in.]
- Phys.org reports on Peter Vincent’s PyFR CFD code being a finalist for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize.
- Hot off this morning’s Twitter feed comes a report from PTC on why top companies simulate early and often. (Registration required.)
- IF YOU READ ONLY ONE LINK FROM THIS POST, MAKE IT THIS ONE: Monica Schnitger gives you a 10-step primer for selecting the best CAE software. [My takeaway? “Don’t think about price; think about value.”]
- Our friends at Desktop Engineering will soon be known as Digital Engineering.
- CFD is not just for rockets and race cars anymore. CFD works on showers, too.
Streamlined Food
Delicious aerodynamics. Nothing more need be written. source