News & Views

• Aviation Week and AIAA have identified this year’s 20 Twenties, outstanding students who are emerging as aerospace leaders. [Is your alma mater represented?]
• DEVELOP3D shares more information about the photo-realistic simulation images from STAR-CCM+.
• Visualizing Data presents their best of the visualization web for January 2017.

Software

Example of hex meshing of runners in Moldex3D R 15.0. Image from Moldex3D. See link below.

• Moldex3D R 15.0 was released with new meshing capabilities (including automatic hex meshing for runners), a streamlined workflow, updated physical models, and more.
  • DEVELOP3D shares their thoughts on this new Moldex3D release.
• NASA’s Software Catalog has been updated to the 2017-2018 version and includes free and other-than-free software, a lot in CFD. A simple search for “CFD” yielded 35 results.
  • New to me is GFSSP, the Generalized Fluid System Simulation Program.
• simFlow 3.1 was released. This OpenFOAM-based CFD solver is available for Windows and Linux in both free and commercial versions. This new version includes new HPC capabilities and new physical models.
• Animated stream lines are coming in ParaView 5.3.
• Beta CAE released v17.1.0 of their software suite.
• Altair released HyperWorks 2017, their “platform for innovation.” New capabilities in this software are too numerous to mention so I’ll focus on one: an improved shrink-wrap mesher for CFD. See image below.

HyperMesh 2017 includes an improved shrink-wrap mesher for CFD. Image from Altair. See link above.

Events

• Coming this summer, the 1st AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop.
• The COMSOL Conference 2017 Boston will be held on 4-6 October. The call for papers is open and abstracts are due by 30 June.
• The Moldex3D Users’ Meeting 2017 – North America will be held 4-5 May in Plymouth, Michigan.

Art of the Grid

Without preamble, here’s a grid-like painting by Dan Walsh. The more I search, the more grid/mesh motifs I can find in painting. [So much for no preamble.]

Dan Walsh, Landing, 2010. Image from Paula Cooper Gallery. See link above.

Bonus: MIT Technology Review’s 10 breakthrough technologies for 2017 [mesh generation not included] does include “Botnets of Things,” the eyepatch-wearing evil twin of the Internet of Things.