News

• Why do engineers hate their current CAD system? According to an Engineering.com survey featured in an Onshape blog post there are four main things to hate. #2 “It is too difficult to import/export files.” Interoperability rears its ugly head again. [When you read their list, remove the word “CAD” and see if those reasons could apply to other CAE software in your arsenal.]
• AIAA announced the 2018 class of Associate Fellows. [If you know someone on the list, why not send them a congratulatory email?]
• There’s plenty of time to register for the Pointwise Meshing Technology Conference in Stuttgart on 4-5 December. As the name implies, this event is all about sharing the details of meshing techniques, geometry handling, mesh effects on CFD solutions, and more.

Comparison of old and new meshing strategies in Moldex-3D R15. Image from injectionmolding.org. See link below.

Events

• Razvan Apetrei provides a nice summary of the recent Royal Aeronautical Society CFD and MDO Conference. [I‘m not saying that just because the NASA CFD 2030 Vision is mentioned.] You can read the full conference agenda online.
  • Mesh adaptation is cited as the technique for reducing the preprocessing burden.
  • Interoperability arises here too in terms of facilitating the exchange of data from CFD solver to postprocessor.
  • What I missed seeing was a mention of high-order meshing (i.e. non-linear elements) for RANS simulations (versus LES or DNS as high-order techniques).
• The 2018 Code_Saturne User Meeting will be held on 5-6 April at the EDF Lab Paris-Saclay and will include news on both Code_Saturne and a multiphase flow solver. Registration is not open yet.
• Flow Science has made available online the proceedings of their 2017 FLOW-3D Americas Users Conference. It appears that registration is required.
• The 6th European Conference on Computational Mechanics and the 7th European Conference on CFD (ECCM ECFD 2018) will be held 11-15 June 2018 in Glasgow. Abstracts are due 15 December.

Applications

Screen capture from a video included in a very cool article about the use of Converge CFD to simulate gas turbine relight for GE.

• Leap Australia and ANSYS helped several collegiate teams succeed in the solar car challenge.
• CFD helped improved the performance of a slurry pump.
• The Society of Plastics Engineers Injection Molding Division shares how new meshing techniques in Moldex3D R15 deliver more automation and better accuracy.

Geometry Made Real

Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (I’ll always think of him as a photographer despite his other works) has produced a series of Mathematical Models by machining aluminum into mathematical formulae. These and others would be interesting to try to create via 3D printing.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Hypersphere: Constant Curvature Surface Revolution of Hyperbolic Type, 2012. Image from the artist’s website. See link above.

Bonus: If you’ve read Neal Stephenson’s novel Seveneves [and if you haven’t I recommend it but you might not want to click the link to avoid a minor spoiler] you should check out this simulation of the plot’s main catalyst.

Double Bonus: The lowly tetrahedron has a property that’s quite unique; each face shares an edge with every other face. The only other shape known to exhibit this property is the slightly more complex Szilassi polyhedron, comprised of seven hexagonal faces.