Applications

• Despite never having broken a bone, this article on the use of simulation to design casts helps me understand why I’ve seen so many incoming college students choose biomedical majors. Abaqus even has a knee simulator add-on.
• CFD is applied on meshes with 500 million cells to refine the aerodynamics of the BMW M4 DTM. See image below. [And despite a lot (OK, some) googling, I couldn’t find out what DTM means.]
• Check out this real-time Navier-Stokes simulation on GPUs.

CFD simulation of a BMW M4 DTM. Image from the BMW blog. See link above.

Software

• CONSELF has developed a CGNS to OpenFOAM file converter.
• ENGINEERING.com shares more information about 3D Precise Mesh, the new module from Spatial that includes meshing from Distene.
• The Barcelona Supercomputing Center published some data related to language use and parallelization.
  • Apps are programmed mostly in Fortran (37%) and C++ (23%).
  • Parallelization is achieved using MPI (39%) and OpenMP (12%).
• Pointfuse converts point clouds to vector models.
• GridPro Version 6.6 was released with new advanced surface meshing and other improvements.
• frentos 0.1.5 is a Python interface to the CGAL mesh generation libraries.

From Pointwise

• Pointwise is heavily committed to the 1st AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop, to be held the weekend prior to AIAA Aviation in Denver in early June. The workshop involves meshing the NASA High Lift CRM aircraft (one of the benchmark cases for the co-located 3rd AIAA CFD High Lift Prediction Workshop) and sharing the results – not just the meshes, but the level of effort and challenges faced in their generation. Abstracts are due today [but I know a guy so you might be able to send yours next week.]

We had a lot of fun making this movie-inspired poster out of the contest meshes for last year’s International Meshing Roundtable. So much so that we’ve put images of it on our website for your use as desktop wallpaper.

News

• Flow Science launched two new user communities on LinkedIn:
  • FLOW-3D
  • FLOW-3D Cast
• SimScale blogs about CAE democratization and call price decreases and lowered learning curves the key enablers.

Meshes Built Upon Sand

Artist Jim Denevan‘s medium is sand. To be more specific, beach sand. And on the beach he executes his ephemeral, geometric, line art. When first seen on Colossal, I knew the following analogy had to be made. Now stay with me. His works (especially the more mesh-like ones like the screen capture below) are very much like meshes in that they are built upon unfirm ground (sloppy CAD), can be huge, take a lot of effort to make (more than we would like), and are erased and forgotten as soon as the fluids arrive. That’s not too much of a stretch, is it?

Screen capture from a video profile of artist Jim Denevan and his beach art. See links above.

I had an interesting conversation this morning with a co-worker about my wall of “mesh art” and the role of “craft” or “level of difficulty in execution” in deciding what was good. For example, the center piece (graphite on ceramic) was deemed “not good” because we can easily make a better airfoil mesh in Pointwise. (It caught my eye in the gallery because it reminded me of airfoils.) My counter argument to the “difficulty of execution” statement is that photography should be then relegated to lower status than a child’s crayon art because how difficult is it to point a camera and click one button. (Comedian Louis C.K. does a very funny bit on his young daughter’s drawings which is devilishly funny.)