This week’s news includes a couple of tantalizing meshing papers (including the work of Li and Barbic shown to the right). In addition, several conferences and events have been added to the calendar. 

News and Events

• Altair reported strong financial results for Q1 with total revenue up 19% (relative to prior year) and software revenue up 26%.
• Envenio has open positions for sales executive and sales engineer in either Boston or Montreal.
• The OpenFOAM Foundation announced OpenFOAM Day 2018, 19 September, a day of presentation discussion centered around “the sustainable development of OpenFOAM.”
• The ENGYS User Group Meeting will be held in London on 3-5 September. The call for papers is open with a due date of 30 June.
• DCS will be holding their CFDEM Conference 2019 on 14-15 March in Linz, Austria. The call for abstracts is open with a due date of 01 September 2018.

Applications

CFD simulation of heat recovery steam generator tubes. Image from powermag.com.

• CFD can be used to help make transmission of electricity more efficient by improving a measure called Dynamic Line Rating that, among other things, takes into account the cooling effect that wind has on the lines. [I had no idea that transmission was so greatly effected by ambient temperature and local winds for cooling.]
• CFD can be used to aid the design of saltwater greenhouses.
• CFD can be used to improve the aero performance of boutique, high-end sports cars like the Spyker c8 Preliator. [Preliator is Latin for fighter which is relevant because the Spyker company was original formed to build fighter aircraft. Had to look that one up.]
• CFD can be used to improve the aero performance of race cars like the Ferrari FXX K Evo.

At Pointwise

• Both attendee registration and the call for abstracts are now open for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2018 (14-15 November in Fort Worth).
• Pointwise Version 18.1 is available for current customers to download and begin using and for new customers to try.

Software

This is a screen capture from a cool section of a video by Li and Barbic on the topic of Immersion of Self-Intersecting Solids and Surfaces, a method for properly dealing with intersecting or nearly intersecting meshes. If nothing else, watch the video.

• Hu et al begin Tetrahedral Meshing in the Wild with this provocative statement: “We propose a novel tetrahedral meshing technique that is unconditionally
  robust, requires no user interaction, and can directly convert a triangle soup
  into an analysis-ready volumetric mesh.” The phrase “analysis-ready” intrigues me the most.
• Envenio’s EXN/Aero CFD solver is now available on Google Cloud.
• ANSYS 19.1 includes ANSYS Twin Builder, what they claim is the first product enabling customer creation of digital twins.
• ENGYS released HELYX v3.0.3, a maintenance release of their CFD software. [In which I am perplexed by the paradoxical phrase “proprietary open-source.”]
• Sandia released Dakota 6.8 for optimization and UQ.

Infinity Mesh

There’s not much to be said about this image except to caution you to not stare at it too long.