Software

A mesh from Pointwise Version 18 illustrating quad-dominant surface meshes, hexahedral layer extrusion, and a source for tetrahedral mesh clustering control.

• Congratulations to Stuart Rogers and his team at NASA Ames for the selection of Pegasus 5 as 2016 NASA Software of the Year. Pegasus 5 is used to assemble overset grids prior to simulation in an overset CFD solver. See image below. [Pointwise’s overset grid assembly capability includes a direct interface to Pegasus 5.]
• Pointwise Version 18, released earlier this week, includes quad-dominant surface meshing, unstructured hexahedral layer extrusion, and tetrahedral clustering sources.
• Meshing is only one aspect of recently released Simpleware 2016.09. Be certain to watch the video.
• The SolidSmack blog delved into SIMIT, the new, open-source, simulation language mentioned here previously. Again, be certain to watch the video.

Applications

This overset grid for the space shuttle’s external tank is typical of the complexity of cases that Pegasus 5 can assemble. It is impossible not to love a grid image like this. See article link above. Image from NASA.

• The Ahmed Body is back in a paper by Envenio that compares performance of their EXN/Aero solver with the performance of ANSYS Fluent and STAR-CCM+.
• On Engineers Rule, you can read about CAD data exchange and some of the issues involved. If you’ve never thought about the details of this before, it’s worth a read. [One nitpick: “I have always considered IGES to be more of a wireframe protocol.” I may be IGES’ last defender on the planet but IGES is a robust standard for surfaces and solids (i.e. B-Rep Solid Model Object, entity 186) if written correctly – which experience has shown me most software does not do.]
• Resolved Analytics wrote a comparison of popular CFD software packages.
• Do you work with valve stems? Here’s an article describing how to simply generate brick meshes for them.
• OneSails Australia uses CFD in the design of sails for yachts.

News & Reading

Visualization of an ANSYS Mechanical 17 simulation from the article below about workstation performance. Image from DEVELOP3D. See link below.

• Desktop Engineering magazine is now Digital Engineering.
• FYFD blogger and fluid dynamics maven Nicole Sharp will give a 24/7 lecture at this year’s Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. [A 24/7 lecture involves presenting your material twice – first in 24 seconds, then using only 7 words. How could we do this for meshing?]
• You have a little less than two months to submit your entry for the ANSYS Hall of Fame.
• The Femap blog shares information from a recent study that reveals how top performing companies use simulation.

Computing

• Despite being about FEA and not CFD, DEVELOP3D’s article on workstation performance for simulation is a worthy read. Using ANSYS Mechanical 17 as a benchmark, their conclusions (if I understand them correctly) are: solid state disk is a no-brainer, RAM is worthwhile, but don’t get seduced by CPUs.
• Cray and LS-DYNA offer a white paper (registration required) on a fan-off simulation of a jet engine.
• The Piz Daint supercomputer is being used for CFD, specifically one of the entries for the Gordon Bell Prize. [In case you had the same question as I, Piz Daint is a mountain peak in the Swiss Alps.]

Mickey-Mesh Mash-Up

You know by now that I am easily amused (in other words, I suffer from chronic shiny object syndrome). In particular, I enjoy when two or more of my interests get mashed-up. The image below is a vintage animation of Mickey Mouse and a grid. I’m fairly certain (because I don’t remember where I found the image) it’s from the Disney film Thru the Mirror from 1936. If you go to that link and read more, you’ll find another image of Mickey and a grid near the end.

Even Mickey Mouse is into grids.

Note: Please remain calm, but due to travel, the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016, and the International Meshing Roundtable, there may not be another This Week in CFD until October. I will see you at two of those events, right?