Events+

• NASA’s Transition Modeling Workshop will be held 13-14 September 2017 in Hampton, Virginia.
• Some deadlines for next month’s International Meshing Roundtable have been extended to 15 August: research notes, posters, meshing contest, and financial aid for students and post docs.
• There’s still time to register for Efficient Meshing with Pointwise, a 1-day workshop on 22 August in College Park, Maryland.
• The weather is influenced by ocean currents. In order to gain a global understanding of this influence, NASA is using a new visualization tool on a 10×23 foot array of screens to view simulations of the entire globe at once.
• On that topic, here are six visualization tips that offer an order of magnitude increase in productivity. #3 Don’t misuse streamlines.

NASA Simulation of ocean currents. Image from insideHPC. See link above. [Does this image remind anyone else of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, even just a little bit?]

Software

• STAR-CCM+ is said to be the first to market with an integrated flow and particulate simulation capability. [Just because I rarely see the phrase “nature of reality” in a CFD article’s title.]
• Tridiagonal released MixIT 4.2 for stirred tank mixing with more flexibility for impellers, coils, and baffles.
• Autodesk will be including CAE capabilities in Inventor at no extra cost.
• Digital Engineering delves into simulation post-processing and visualization.

Exploring simulation data sets with Tecplot. Image from Digital Engineering. See link above.

Applications

• SimScale shares simulations on tractor-trailer aerodynamics.
• Use of GPUs for less invasive diagnosis of gastrointestinal issues. [Just because I rarely see the words “GPU” and “bowels” in the same headline.]
• You don’t often see CFD mentioned in Bloomberg Business week but it is, at least obliquely, in this article about supersonic aircraft.
• MIT has developed a CAD plugin called InstantCAD that helps optimize designs by automating the exploration of a parametric design space in the cloud. [I found this news item and the teaser from ANSYS below to be eerily similar.]

Does anyone have any idea what ANSYS has up their sleeve? Click here for video with more (?) details.

Meshing on My Mind

Alert reader Chris shared with me Juame Plensa’s wire mesh sculpture of a young girl’s head called Wonderland. The artist’s intent is for viewers to get inside the meshed head and think about dreams and future possibilities. But what if meshing is inside your head leaving no room for dreams?

As first seen on Colossal, also seen at My Modern Met. See the artist’s website here.

Bonus points for the tri mesh on the building in the background.

Juame Plensa, Wonderland. “I believe the architecture of our bodies is the palace for our dreams.” Image from Colossal. See links above.

Bonus: My most recent faceted find (at the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art) is the reddish object in the background of the photo below. Can you guess what it’s supposed to be used for?