News and Jobs

• Today is International Women in Engineering Day. How about using the hashtag #INWED17 on Twitter to tell everyone about the women engineers in your organization?
• Altair wants to hire a solver development engineer.
• Areva, based in Washington state, seeks to hire a Thermal-Hydraulics CFD Engineer.
• NASA has an internship opening for adjoint methods for CFD analysis and design.
• DLR, Airbus, and ONERA have entered into a partnership to develop a next-generation CFD solver.  [Is this like CREATE here in the U.S?]
• Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand it’s cancelled. NASA’s challenge to improve the performance of FUN3D CFD has been terminated. They received over 1,800 applications and realized the vetting requirements for the FUN3D software would be impractical to implement. [Trying hard not to judge.]

Totally cool video from ONERA with a CFD simulation of a WWII-era Dewoitine 551 aircraft on a structured multi-block grid.

Applications

• Viking Pumps uses CFD to optimize their fluid handling equipment.
• CAESES has launched an online geometry tool so you can generate geometries for the MVRC challenge (design an Le Mans prototype car and simulate its performance using CFD). See image below. [Not being a car guy, I had to google the acronym LMP. My ignorance aside, I’d like to hear back from other folks who use this tool.]
• Also, the call for presentations is now open for the CAESES Users’ Meeting (27-29 Sep 2017).
• Engineering.com shares work done by Mentor Graphics to do a system-level CFD analysis using mixed 1-D and 3-D CFD simulations. (Interoperability of multi-dimensional modeling is one of the challenges cited by the ASSESS Initiative.)
• How about Diabatix’s browser-based CFD modeling of liquid cooling? In which we read, “The automation of engineering tools has generally not kept up with designers’ needs.”

Screen shot of the CAESES geometry tool for the MVRC challenge. Image from CAESES. See link above.

• As reported in Scientific American, CFD is being used to gain insight into how how 600 million year old organisms lived by reverse engineering them from their fossils. [I would’ve paid money for a CFD image in this article.]
• Uncertain quantification of a CFD simulation of turbulent jets, thesis work at Northern Arizona with contributions from FieldView. (UQ is one of the topics cited in the NASA CFD Vision 2030 Study.)
• Volvo won an award for a new piston that was designed with the aid of CFD.
• Simulation was used to make better puffed rice.
• How about using CFD for “anti-soiling“? [Not what I originally thought. PowerFLOW is being used to simulate the accumulation of dirt etc. on a car’s exterior to understand better how to keep external cameras and sensors clean and clear.]
• And architects can use CFD (in the cloud or otherwise) to better understand how wind flows around their buildings, especially in an urban environment.

News & Events

I just like this award-winning photo of graphene powder mixing in alcohol. Read about it at FYFD.

• Envenio has received an investment of $1.3 million. [Full disclosure: Envenio offers a cloud-based version of Pointwise to their customers for CFD mesh generation.]
• The DoE awarded NVIDIA funding from the Exascale Computing Project to develop a next-generation supercomputer. (Exascale computing platforms are part of the NASA CFD Vision 2030 Study.)
• Registration is now open for TFAWS, the Thermal & Fluids Analysis Workshop.
• The 40th International Conference on Software Engineering is next year in Gothenburg.

Software

• [New to me:] HORSES2D, a high-order, 2D, DG, spectral element, Navier-Stokes solver.
• Coming in STAR-CCM+ v12.04, discrete element modeling of particles with polyhedral shapes.
• ParaView 5.4.0 was released.
• SimVascular claims to be “the only fully opensource software package providing a complete pipeline from medical image data segmentation to patient specific blood flow simulation and analysis.”
• Six mistakes you should never make when generating your CFD grids (from Abdullah Karimi). #1 “Never use first iteration of automatically-generated mesh.” [If true, what’s implied about the current state of automatic meshing?]
• Let the debate begin/continue: is proprietary or open-source software better for users? Asked by our friends at Simscale. [My answer: it depends. My other answer: it’s not a religion.]
• Envenio has published the EXN/Aero Theory Manual.

Visualization

• Anyone thing that bivariate choropleth maps (as described by Visualizing Data) could be of benefit to visualizing CFD results?
• The annual Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards – celebrating information design – is now open for entries.

City of the Mesh

Alert reader Mike shared with me the following photograph he took of Gemma Danielle’s mural City of the Sun (2015). He and I were both in Denver recently for AIAA Aviation and we both apparently were on the Cherry Creek Trail but he saw it and I missed it.

You can read here where the artist says “This mural looks very fluid and full of motion, but actually it’s made up of thousands of straight lines.”

She can’t be any clearer; it is a CFD mesh.

Gemma Danielle, City of the Sun, 2015. Photo credit.