The subject of wind tunnels and testing has come up a lot in the last couple of weeks so it’s perfect that this post includes a link to a photo essay of NASA’s wind tunnels. Of course, there’s all the normal CFD goodness too, such as the Converge-Tecplot partnership illustrated here. 

Applications

• CFD is being applied to the design of an electric vehicle that will compete in Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb.
• Here’s a brief article on how Procter & Gamble and the Ohio Supercomputer Center work together not just on P&G’s unique simulation needs but also to bring the benefits of simulation to small and medium-sized businesses. [In which I learned that P&G maintains the website http://www.pgscience.com to promote their use of technology (and to recruit talent).]
• CFD validation and grid sensitivity studies of full-scale ship self propulsion.

Vortices enable the complex aerobatics of Peregrine falcons. (a) Oil flow from wind tunnel test. (b) Streamlines from CFD. (c) Streamlines in white, surface shear stress in color. Image from nature.com.

News

• Convergent Science and Tecplot have partnered to deliver Tecplot for Converge with every Converge CFD license.
  • For a technical look at this partnership, read this blog post.
• MUST SEE: Historic (and gorgeous) photos of NASA’s wind tunnels from The Atlantic. [I wish they had included at least one of the 10×10 supersonic tunnel at NASA Lewis (now Glenn), where I spent the summer of 1983.]
• From Forbes comes The Future of Manufacturing Technologies. Some highlights:
  • The market for artificial intelligence will grow at 55% CAGR through 2021.
  • 3-D printing market will grow 22%.
  • Robotics 20%
  • IoT 15%
  • “Digital design, simulation, and integration (DDSI)” [an acronym I’ve never seen before] 12%
• Numeca has an opening for a Development Engineer – CFD Numerics.
• Revolution in Simulation is an initiative all about democratizing the use of engineering simulation software primarily through the development and deployment of “sim apps.”

Spotted at 23rd and Walker in Oklahoma City: Roam by Chaney Shores. Thank you, Sean.

Events

• A video (47 minutes) of the SU2 International Developers Society launch meeting is available on YouTube for those of us who missed it.
• The call for papers deadline for the International Meshing Roundtable has been extended to 06 June.
• The theme of this year’s 3D Collaboration and Interoperability Congress (15-18 October 2018) is enterprise accountability.

Software & Hardware

• FEATool 1.8 was released with a “full integrated and cross-platform OpenFOAM CFD Solver GUI interface for MATLAB and GNU Octave.”
• Also for MATLAB, QuickerSim version 2.3 was released.
• Pattern Computer has gone public with their “hypothesis-generating engine” that finds novel patterns in complex data.

Piper at the Gates of Dawn

I’m not familiar at all with the work of Adrian Piper except that the MoMA is hosting a retrospective of her work, A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965-2016. But when I saw the abstract work below in a tweet by Tyler Green I became curious about the path an artist takes from geometric abstraction to multimedia and performance. I don’t know the answer but am intrigued by the question.

Adrian Piper, Sixteen Permutations of a Nine-Part Floating Square, 1968. Photo credit: Tyler Green @TylerGreenDC, the man (pardon the pun) behind the Modern Art Notes (MAN) podcast.

Bonus: Work by physicists and mathematicians on mirror symmetry promises to reveal a “geometric DNA” that will explain the duality of symplectic and complex geometry.