Awards, Contests, and Events

• Proving that you never know who’ll be talking about CFD next, Jeff Bezos tweeted that Blue Origin’s recent wind tunnel tests of the New Glenn rocket helped validate their CFD simulations.
• ANSYS seeks your simulation results by 04 November to compete for inclusion in the ANSYS Hall of Fame.
• The Kantar Visualization is Beautiful awards published their long list of finalists including the data visualization category.
• Have you ever considered publishing your CFD results to 3D PDF? Engineers Rule writes about how to get started with 3D PDF.

Computing

• Microsoft announced the addition to Azure of some H-series virtual machines that will be useful for running CFD simulations.
• Is container technology the key to bringing HPC closer to every engineer?

Use of CFD for the design of filtration devices. Image from filtsep.com. Click image for article.

Events & Computing

• CEI announced two upcoming events.
  • CEI announced that EnSight 10.2 will be demonstrated publicly at AIAA SciTech in the DFW area this January. The software will be released this fall making SciTech one of the first public demos.
  • P.S. Pointwise will be at AIAA SciTech 2017.
  • CEI also announced their Japanese User Group Meeting in Tokyo on 04 November.
• SC16, the supercomputing conference, announced that the team from Imperial College is a finalist for best paper and the Gordon Bell Prize: Toward Green Aviation with Python at Petascale (with PyFR).
• Fortissimo, an EU project designed to provide pay-per-use, on-demand simulation to small and medium-sized enterprises has issued a call for proposals seeking “modelling and simulation of coupled physical processes and high-performance data analytics (HPDA) and in all cases targeting benefits for engineering and manufacturing SMEs.”
• FloEFD Simulation Conference 2016, the inaugural global event for this CFD software, will be held 08-09 November in Frankfurt.

Meshing

• If you ever need to manually map-mesh a plate with a hole, here’s how.
• Version 1.2 of BlockRanger, a hex mesh generating plugin for Rhino, was released. (See image below.)
• Also for Rhino, reverse engineering plugin Mesh2Surface 4.2 was released.
• TwinMesh 2016, the latest version of the “revolutionary meshing solution for reliable CFD analysis of rotary positive displacement machines,” has been released.

Visualization & Other Software

• Beta CAE launched v17.0.1 of their software suite.
• Tecplot launched Tecplot RS 2016 for visualization of oil reservoir simulations.
• HPCCloud v0.9, a web-based simulation environment, was launched for running simulations (e.g. PyFR) on a cloud provider (e.g. Amazon EC2).

Example of a hex mesh generated using BlockRanger. Image from rhino3d.com. See link above.

Escape to Art

As is my habit, I took time while in Washington, DC for the International Meshing Roundtable, to visit the National Gallery of Art – East Building which coincidentally reopened to the public on the day of my visit after a 3-year renovation. I was lucky enough to have the company of two other IMR refugees and a spouse.

(One of my rules of social media is that if I erase what I’ve typed twice, I don’t write anything at all. I just failed at three attempts to describe the dazzling effect of the remodeled building and the arrangement of artwork. Therefore, here are some pictures with mesh-like aspects. I’ll remind you that I’m a poor photographer and have a bad habit of forgetting to photograph the nameplates beside works I’m not familiar with.)

National Gallery of Art – East Building

Ellsworth Kelly

Rachel Whiteread

I believe the work on the right is by Donald Judd.

Agnes Martin

If anyone wants to sneak out of SciTech 2017 to visit The Modern in Fort Worth (and maybe get some Tex-Mex along the way), just let me know.

Bonus: The fluid dynamics aspects of floating, preening, swimming, spitting and sneezing.