News

• Is the sky really falling? A DoE and NSA report fears the U.S. may lose its lead in HPC within a decade. On the other hand, the article’s author thinks chasing an arbitrary milestone like exascale isn’t as optimal as continuous, organic improvement.
• Also on the HPC topic, Fujitsu’s HPC Gateway promises to simplify access to HPC resources.
• Onshape says you’re paying too much for your CAD software if you rarely use technical support. They cite 3 other reasons too.
• Thunderbird Power is using STAR-CCM+ to design a wind turbine.
• The CAD Society announced it’s annual award winners:
• Here’s best of the visualization web for February 2017.
• If you’re displaying math on the web using MathJax, you need to know that it’s shutting down at the end of this month.

Screen capture from the video Understanding Meshing Errors in Autodesk Simulation CFD.

Software

• Bulk materials simulation just got a bit more accessible with EDEM’s launch of a series of products EDEM for ANSYS, MSC, and Siemens.
• Phi is new 3-D modeling software from start-up Phenometry (founded by former Spatial folks) which features n-sided surfaces and a web-based user interface that promised to “democratize 3-D design.”
  • Read more about Phi at Engineering.com in “Modeling Still Hard, Let’s Patch Things Up.”
• Particle In Cell released Starfish v0.16.1, their 2-D solver for plasma and gas kinetics.
• The latest version of Moldex3D (R15.0) includes automatic hex meshing for runners and much more.

Events

• The 26th International Meshing Roundtable is scheduled for 18-21 September 2017 in Barcelona. The Call for Papers deadline is 30 May.
• A short course on Code_Saturne and Salome has been scheduled for June in London.
• Senior staff from Metacomp Technologies will be leading the short course on Turbulence Modeling for Modern Industrial CFD at the AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum.
• The 3rd AIAA CFD High Lift Prediction Workshop will be held 3-4 June in Denver in advance of the AIAA Aviation Forum.
• The 1st AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop will be held 3-4 June in Denver in advance of the AIAA Aviation Forum. (GMGW-1 is co-located and will share sessions with HiLiftPW-3. One registration fee gives you access to both workshops.)
• Learn how CFD is used to optimize surf boards using Pointwise for meshing and CRAFT Tech’s CRUNCH CFD for the flowfield solution on 25 April.

4-D Printed Space Mesh Fabric

This so-called “space fabric” is a prototype from NASA’s JPL where they’re 3-D printing (or actually 4-D printing because it’s 3-D geometry plus function) woven metal for use in space as shielding, space suits, or solar arrays. Thanks to alert reader Carolyn for sharing this with me.

NASA’s Space Fabric looks like a structured grid to me. Image from NASA. See link above.

Another example of a metal, mesh-like fabric (of sorts) was interesting, but cannot be shown here without giving this blog post an R rating.

And how about a bonus?

Bonus: This so-called Q*bert Hex Mesh was shared by reader Jeff whom I’m hoping will point me at its original source including location and artist.

Bonus Science: Please take a moment to ponder how you’d simulate this in your CFD solver: a fluid with negative mass. Scientists have created a fluid that seemingly violates Newton’s second law because the acceleration opposes the direction of the applied force. The behavior of this fluid, a Bose-Einstein condensate, plays a little trick with inertial mass.