This Week in CFD

Applications

BMW-M4-DTM-fluid-dynamics-02-750x500

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

Software

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.]
760X490_IMR_WallPaper_Marquee_V2

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:
  • 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?

Jim-Denevan-beach

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.)

mesh-art-wall

 

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3 Responses to This Week in CFD

  1. John Chawner says:

    Alert reader Mike tells me that DTM = Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft (German Touring Car Championship), A.K.A., German NASCAR. He is apparently better at the google than I am. Thanks, Mike.

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