This week’s round-up of CFD news includes an article about the mathematics of the Navier-Stokes equations that’ll make you go “Hmmm,” news about the ASSESS Initiative’s membership drive, plus the usual assortment of announcements. But oddly, not much CFD imagery. 

Non-Unique Navier-Stokes

• We all know there’s a prize waiting for whomever first proves the existence and uniqueness of smooth solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. Recently, mathematicians have shown that under certain assumptions the N-S equations produce non-unique results; starting from some initial conditions you can obtain two different outcomes. [I know for a fact we’ve seen this in CFD, but the math is way too heavy for my brain on a Friday. OK, any day.]
• Bonus math: From Futility Closet comes this teaser. If each letter represents a digit and each word is a square integer, what four numbers are represented by MERRY XMAS TO ALL?

Is it a grid? Or a fluid? source

Reading

• For those of you who are working to meet the requirements of NIST Standard Practice 800-171 (Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Systems and Organizations), the folks at Kitware share an open-source solution. [If you have government or federal government contractors as customers, like we do with our large aerospace market presence, you probably have seen a requirement to support NIST 800-171 buried deep within purchase orders and other contract documents. Pointwise has been compliant since the beginning of 2017.]
• The ASSESS Initiative (Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Strategies) will be open for membership in early 2018. Membership includes access to all reports and other deliverables and a discount on the annual congress.
• “The standards of practice in verification of computer codes and applied calculations are generally appalling.” Thus begins an article on the inseparability of verification and numerical analysis. [If you use CFD without performing your own V&V, you are behaving irresponsibly.]
• On a quasi-related note, the recording of our recent webinar on The Influence of Meshing Strategies on Simulation Efficiency is available for you to watch at your leisure.
• SimScale shared their list of the best fluid mechanics books.

Software & Visualization

• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for November 2017.
• ESI released SimulationX 3.9, their multiphysics platform.
• COMSOL released Multiphysics Server v5.3a.
• MSC Software released Actran 18 for acoustic simulations.

Events & Other

• For those of you attending AIAA SciTech early next month in Orlando…
  • A group of attendees will meet in the hotel lobby at 6am on Tuesday and Thursday mornings to go for a leisurely run.
  • AIAA will be having a Twitter and Instagram contest using the hashtag #aiaaSciTech. Follow the tag on social media to keep up with the conference. Rules here.
  • Seek out all the Pointwise folks who’ll be there presenting.
• ThermoAnalytics’ 2018 Global User Group Meeting will be held 13-15 March in Munich.
• Market Forecasts
  • CFD market in Asia/Pacific to grow 10.28% during 2018-2022. The report identifies growth in the biomedical application of CFD.
  • From the announcement of a report said to include data that will “exponentially accelerate your business” comes these insights:
    • “Top manufacturers covered in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Market reports are: Company 1, Company 2, Company 3, Company 4, Company 5 and many more….” [Like Company 6, Company 7, and Company 8?]
    • “Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Market: Type wise segment: Type 1; Type 2;”
    • “Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Market Applications wise segment: Application 1, Application 2, Application 3.”
  • The global CFD market is predicted to grow 13.6% from 2014 to 2019.

Applications

• CFD-designed wingtip saberlets on the Sukhoi Superjet 100 are expected to cut fuel use by at least 3%.
• Hot and less-dense air result in more baseball homeruns. Analysis has indicated that a 1 degree increase in air temperature leads to 4 inches more ball travel.

Thank You

In this penultimate edition of This Week in CFD for 2017 and the last before the Christmas holiday I thank each of you for reading, commenting, and interacting with us here at Another Fine Mesh. Those of you who are email subscribers now exceed 3,000 with an uncounted number subscribing by RSS and other means. I encourage you to email all suggestions for what you’d like to read here to blog@pointwise.com.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite meshes. This was generated by our own Erick Gantt back in around 2000 with Gridgen when we held contests for designing our annual holiday card.

Happy Holidays to you all.