Applications and Events

• CFD investigation of the flowfield in a swimmer’s wake. (Registration required.)
• The 2nd OpenFOAM French Users Meeting will be held on 21-22 March 2017 at the ISAT Engineering School. [Please pardon any factual errors due to my poor translation of the French language.]
• Boom Technology is using CFD as part of their effort to bring back supersonic transoceanic air travel.
• Keynote speakers from Boeing, Porsche, and more were announced for this summer’s NAFEMS World Congress.
• The Call for Papers is now open for this September’s International Meshing Roundtable in Barcelona. Full papers are due 30 May.

Increased combustion accuracy is coming in STAR-CCM+ v12.02. Be certain to watch the video at the link. Also read the article because if a kid thinks it’s real fire, it’s real fire. [Just like if a kid says you’re fat, you’re fat.] Image from Siemens PLM.

Servers

• Tecplot’s SZL server, available in Tecplot 360 2017, provides remote data access via a client-server architecture. Learn more from the video at the link.
• Pointwise’s Glyph server, recently released as part of Pointwise V18.0 R2, provides the ability to use virtually any scripting language (e.g. Python, Perl) to execute Glyph commands via a client-server architecture. There’s a Glyph server webcast scheduled for 22 February.

Reduce fuel consumption by 11% using plasma? Read all about it from Symscape.

News and More News

• Jacobs in Hunstville seeks to hire a CFD engineer.
• Inside HPC shares this video and slide deck on the topic of exascale computing using Fortran. [I recall 30 years ago being told that while we didn’t know what programming languages would look like 30 years in the future, we did know that they’d be called Fortran.]
• Digital Engineering’s article on Engineering the Software User Experience is a worthy read. In it they discuss four UI themes which I quote directly here:
  • make the model the menu;
  • reduce the initial barriers to entry;
  • progressive disclosure; and
  • customization is always an option.
• NVIDIA reported revenue of US$2.17 billion in the calendar quarter ending January 2017. Statements in the article about their financial performance indicates in AI and related applications. Nothing about CFD or CAE.
  • But there is something about CFD in DEVELOP3D’s article about NVIDIA’s new double precision Quadro GP100.
• Envenio interviewed Resolved Analytics’ Stewart Bible about CFD, cloud computing, optimization, and more.
• [I only recently discovered] CrunchYard, a cloud service provider targeting CFD.

“Computational modeling will become a very important part of the personalization of medicine.” Hear this and more in a fascinating look at Dassault Systemes’ Living Heart Project. Image from Dassault Systems. 

Software

• Friendship Systems released CAESES 4.2.
• Beta CAE release v17.0.4 of their software suite.
• Dassault Systemes announced Simulation Engineer, a suite of apps within SolidWorks for solving “complex, non-linear, static structural problems.”
• More from the non-linear structural simulation world – an interview about MSC Software’s Marc.
• An article about Onshape appeared in a recent issue of Bloomberg Business Week under the title Engineering Software Finally Starts Moving to the Cloud [emphasis mine].

In what probably should be my CFD application of the week, this screen shot is from a McDonald’s video showing their use of CFD to design the STRAW, an advanced straw for suctioning up their new chocolate shamrock shake. As first seen on Engadget. One month later and I would’ve chalked this up as April Fools fodder. At least they’re not taking themselves too seriously.

More Reticulation

Painter Kyle Sorenson focuses on “representing urban and metropolitan spaces through various forms of geometric abstraction.” The painting shown below caught my eye because it has been painted on birch wood creating just enough tension between the organic and inorganic.

Kyle Sorenson, Reticulation, 2013. Image from artist’s website. See link above.

Bonus: We talk a lot about topology in mesh generation. So I found the video Who (else) cares about topology? quite interesting. You may too. However, this clock composed of a triangular array of 15 circles is beyond my comprehension.

P.S. No This Week in CFD next week because it’s time to visit the mouse again.