This week’s CFD news includes many people-oriented items including a podcast about women in CFD, a profile of a weather simulation researcher, the launch of an open-source CFD society, and the call for papers for a mesh generation user’s conference [hint, hint].

People

• The Talking CFD podcast presents Women in CFD Roundtable, a look at the issues faced by the women in our industry including the dreaded mansplaining. [Highly recommend listening.]
• Mesh generation and HPC technologies are at the core of numerical weather prediction as this profile of researcher Willem Deconinck shows.
• Two of the engineering innovation awards presented by E&P magazine involve use of CFD: one for a well-cementing technique and the other for a means of reducing vibration and drag on offshore rig risers. Nominations for 2019’s awards are due in January 2019.

Screen capture from an introductory video to Autodesk CFD.

At Pointwise

• We’ve collected some good data so far in our Mesh Generation and CAD Interoperability survey and we’re hoping to collect more. You have until May 10 to share your experiences so please take less than 9 minutes to answer at most 9 questions.
• What’s better than spending 2 days learning about mesh generation? Talking about mesh generation. The call for presentations for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2018 is open.
• Garry Rogers Motorsport used Pointwise as part of the process of redesigning and recertifying their car due to rule changes. Read how they did it here.

Events & Software

• Registration is open for the Salome_CFD UK User Meeting and Training on 5-6 June 2018 in Manchester.
• On 31 May AIAA will offer the webinar High Order CFD Methods: Results and Advancements from the 5th International Workshop. This 90-minute event will provide an update on the current state-of-the-art in high order techniques for CFD based on the workshop held this past January.
• Beta CAE released v18.1.1 of their software suite.

Non-reflective boundary conditions are coming in TwinMesh 2018. Image from twinmesh.com.

Applications

• The SU2 International Developers Society is now accepting members (no fee) to “connect, inspire, and expand the international SU2 developer community by sharing our passion for building high-quality, open-source software for simulation and design.”
• It should come as no surprise that aerodynamics are being addressed in the sport of motorcycle racing. But the exact manner of how it’s being addressed may be surprising: they want to end fancy aerodynamics shapes and winglets because they are “spending too much money for too little gain.” [Winglets on a motorcycle – who knew?]
• Aerodynamics are also under fire for the 2019 season of Formula 1 in order to allow more overtaking on the track to improve the spectacle for audience.
• Here’s a tutorial on simulating an airfoil in SolidWorks Flow Simulation. [In which I learned something new – what the term “Hershey bar” refers to.]

Illustration of how a halo (a single layer of cells) enables communication between computational subdomains (indicated by colors) of a mesh for numerical weather prediction. Image from ecmwf.int. See link above.

Finding Patterns in History and Nature

Terry Winters sees his paintings at the intersection of art and science, “a reflective and speculative picturing of nature.” Pattern making, such as one finds in Islamic art, is especially influential as it tends to reflect the historical context. The trick is find a contemporary context for patterns in contemporary works.

If this intrigues you, read this interview with Terry on Hyperallergic and scroll down to his painting Parallel Rendering 2 for an unstructured counterpart to the structured grid in Scale shown below.

Terry Winters, Scale, 2003. Image from terrywinters.org. See link above.