This Week in CFD

News

  • The ASSESS Initiative (Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Strategies) has launched a Simulation Business Challenges Survey in advance of this year’s congress to deepen our understanding of the current state of practice. Please take time to complete the survey. [If I remember, I’ll post the results here after the congress.]
  • 3-D spatial reasoning has always been a challenge within the field of mesh generation. Along those lines, here’s a new development that efficiently creates 3-D objects from 2-D images. [If this doesn’t make you pause and go “Hmm” I don’t know what will.]
  • Not CFD, but an interesting analogy that related to study of human intellect: aerodynamics for cognition.
airbus-star-ecs

Original (top) and optimized (bottom) design of a mixer for an aircraft environmental control system. CFD by STAR-CCM+. Image from Aerospace Manufacturing and Design. See link below.

Events & Job

Applications

Parvancorina-CFD-simulation-CFD

CFD simulations from COMSOL are helping us understand how the Parvancorina, a 500 million year old sea creature about the size of a penny, moved. Image from COMSOL.

ilight_mb_logo

Intelligent Light’s server-side rendering is featured in this NVIDIA article about linking an application with OpenGL. Image from NVIDIA.

Software

  • The recently released ANSYS 18.2 includes unstructured mesh adaptation in the form of a patented technique called PUMA, polyhedral unstructured mesh adaptation.
  • ParaView 5.4.1 (a bug-fix release) is now available.

Clarity via Minimization

Antoine de Saint-Exupery is often quoted as saying “A designer knows when he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

If we agree that principle applies to engineering design why can’t it equally be applied to art? Yet minimal art is often ridiculed as requiring zero effort and therefore deserving zero credit. On Ideelart the article Brilliant Examples of Minimal Art illustrates why minimalism deserves attention, including Agnes Martin’s grid-like work, Friendship, shown below.

Agnes Martin - Friendship

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963. From an article on minimalist art from IdeelArt. See link above.

Bonus: Fluid science answers the tough questions of our time. What is the optimal duration for dunking a cookie in milk? Answer: 2-5 seconds. [I personally don’t engage in cookie dunking so I’m interested in readers’ experiences with this finding.]

This entry was posted in Applications, Events, News, Software and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply