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.

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

• FLOW Science announced the speakers for next month’s 2017 FLOW-3D Americas Users Conference leading off with a keynote from Dr. Edward Furlani from SUNY Buffalo.
• CHAM seeks to hire a software development and CAD engineer to work on their CFD plugin for Rhino.
• Join Pointwise as we take meshing on the road around the globe.
  • Daejeon, South Korea – 16 Oct 2017 – Efficient Meshing with Pointwise
  • Stuttgart, Germany – 4-5 Dec 2017 – Meshing Technology Conference
• The website for the AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop has been moved to www.gmgworkshop.com.

Applications

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.

• From Datacenter Dynamics comes this article about the potential applications of VR to CFD.
• Along those same lines, advanced 3D rendering is being used in the design and marketing of race cars.
• Keppel used CFD to design some of the “most hydrodynamically efficient hulls in the world” for two liquid natural gas tankers to be built and delivered in 2020.
• Disinfecting wastewater with UV light was studied with CFD.
• Airbus used STAR-CCM+ to optimize environmental control systems.
• Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder are using a new Argonne supercomputer for simulations of turbulent flow over an aircraft’s tail assembly. [Click through to see the flow viz if nothing else.]

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, 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.]