While it’s not for me to tell you what to watch or read, there are two must watch videos this week. The first – screenshot shown here – is a beautiful simulation of Rayleigh-Benard convection. The second is an article with embedded video interviews about our friend democratization and what it really means.  

Events

• The USACM Thematic Conference on Isogeometric Analysis will be held on 10-12 October 2018 in Austin, Texas. Abstracts are due by 15 July.
• The SIAM Conference on Geometric Design will be held on 17-19 June 2019 in Vancouver.
• Registration is open and keynote and other speakers are being announced for the 2018 Global Altair Technology Conference in Paris on 16-18 October.

CFD simulation showing the effect of adding a Hull Vane to a coast guard ship resulting in significant reductions in fuel use. Image is a screen capture of a video from marinelog.com. 

News from Pointwise

• We’ve compiled a 4-part blog series and more into The Ultimate Guide to Writing Import and Export Plugins, 50+ pages of everything you need to know to more fully integrate Pointwise into your CFD workflow by adding the ability to read and write the files you need. Download your copy today.
• We have two relatively new on-demand webinars for your entertainment and education.
  • Meshing Automation and Adaptability in Pointwise V18.1 – You’ll see and learn about the new features in V18.1 so you can put them to use on your meshes.
  • Meshing the Potsdam Propeller Test Case – This walk-through of the actual meshing process for a marine propeller will demonstrate how-tos and best practices that you can easily adopt for your next mesh.
• The Pointwise User Group Meeting 2018 is closer than it seems (14-15 November).
  • You know you want to compete for The Meshy Award – the mesh generated in Pointwise that exemplifies “visual appeal, originality, and uniqueness.” We’re accepting entries through 26 September.
  • Attendee registration is open. Now is the time to reserve your hotel room at the preferred rate.
  • The Call for Presentations is open. This is your opportunity to showcase your CFD work with an emphasis on the meshing.

Software

ANSYS announced the 3 winners of their Discovery Live Engineering Design Competition. Shown here is the winning entry from the Formula SAE team at the University of Utah. Image from ansys.com.  [I love it when students are able to put CFD to good use.]

• Rhino Compute [appears to be in beta aka “work in progress”] is “geometry as a service” [my term] or a “cloud-based geometry calculator for developers” [their term] accessible through an API.
• Beta CAE released v18.1.2 of their software suite.
• OpenFOAM 6 was released.
• [A little piece of me dies every time I write something like this but] midas MeshFree looks like a new FEA freeware product.
• Here’s a long-ish overview piece from Simulia about PowerFLOW.
• The latest issue of PRONET Update for code_aster users is now online.

Applications

Gratuitous meshing in consumer products: the Lumipack. Thanks to alert reader David.

• MUST WATCH video of the week: 2-D Rayleigh-Benard Convection. [I could put this on a loop and watch it all day.]
• Should watch videos of the week: Pushing Democratization Beyond a Buzzword from NAFEMS and Digital Engineering.
• Are you interested in a side-by-side comparison of 2-D cylinder flow using OpenFOAM, FEniCS, and FEATool?
• Here’s a 1-hour recorded webinar on marine CFD using Orca3D.
• Numeca seeks to hire a Lattice Boltzmann CFD engineer.
• Knock, knock. Who’s there? CFD who? CFD, to solve that knocking problem.

CFD can help design drag heads for dredging applications. Image from dredgingtoday.com. 

Meshing Uber Alles

From the “you never know who’s generating meshes” category – or at least doing tiling – the folks at Uber Engineering use a hexagonal tiling to map the globe, countries, states, and cities to optimize ride pricing geographically. Their software, H3, was recently released on GitHub if you care to give it a try.

Why hexagons? They minimize quantization error.

Uber tiles the world with hexagons using their H3 software. Image from uber.com. See link above.