In this week’s post you’ll see some news from Pointwise about two upcoming events and a brand new case study about best practices gained from generating meshes for the propulsion aerodynamics workshop. The rest of the news, while good, is rather sparse and when you read you’ll learn why. Which is also why there’s this NASA photo of clouds on Jupiter.

Events

• NAFEMS has opened the call for papers (due 01 November) for the NAFEMS World Congress 2019 in Quebec City on 17-20 June.
• Registration is open for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2018 on 14-15 November in Fort Worth.

Software

• Our friends at TotalSim have launched Bramble (bramblecfd.com), a framework for either in-house or cloud-based CFD in which the results are stored in a database that is queried and visualized with web-based tools.
• On LinkedIn, Lubos Pirkl answers the ultimate question, “Which CFD code is the best?” None, is his answer. [I like his analogy position that any CFD code is capable of producing good and bad results. For me, the question is like a carpenter asking which saw is best. I could have the best saw in the world and still produce nothing but sawdust.]
• Overture is an “object-oriented code framework for solving PDEs” that is open source and freely available at overtureframework.org. [I have known about Overture for years but hadn’t seen this website before, nor did I know it’s development now seems to be led by RPI and Livermore.]
• Another open framework for scientific computing is COOLFluiD, originally from VKI.

From the “things you’d never expect to see meshed” department comes the High Heel Wedding Church in Taiwan.

News & Applications

• Visualizing Data presents their best of the visualization web for May 2018.
• Beta CAE released v19.0.0 of their software suite which includes more virtual reality.
• Machine learning models are shown in one case to be an adequate substitute for CFD in cases of atmospheric dispersion of gases (i.e. pollutants).
• CFD is being used to help set a world speed record for a boat (currently 180 mph).

From Pointwise

• We’ve documented our best practices for meshing the benchmark cases for the 4th AIAA Propulsion Aerodynamics Workshop (PAW04) and it’s available for you to download from our website.
• On 18 September we will be in Hamburg hosting a workshop on Attaining Reliable CFD Predictions in Marine and Wind Energy. Registration for this free event is now open.

Defining Space Line by Line

Because today’s post is a bit of a mess (see below) I figured why not push my luck by posting an artwork that’s certain to inspire strong opinions. I first encountered one of Fred Sandback‘s works several years ago in Toronto but within the past year or so The Modern here in Fort Worth was showing one of his installations.

These works are done with yarn. The effect for me of all his works (like the one shown below) is to define and shape 3-D space using the simplest 1-D element of all – a line. It’s fun to watch other museum goers interact with Sandback’s works, how they will go around them as though they’re solid (albeit transparent) walls.

In a statement of his from 1999 (and yes, I formed my opinion long before reading this):

Early on, though, I left the model of such discrete sculptural volumes for a sculpture which became less of a thing-in-itself, more of a diffuse interface between myself, my environment, and others peopling that environment, built of thin lines that left enough room to move through and around. Still sculpture, though less dense, with an ambivalence between exterior and interior. A drawing that is habitable.

The parallels with meshing are obvious. The lines we generate around the perimeter of cells define the volumetric space on which your computations will be made. The meshes are an abstraction, and ethereal construction that define the space through and around which the flow moves.

Fred Sandback, Untitled (Sculptural Study, Seven-part Right-angled Triangular Construction), 1982/2010. source

Note: This edition of This Week in CFD is a bit of a mess. Publication was delayed by a company event. But Google Chrome decided on its own to resort all my bookmarks – again. And you can probably imagine how big my bookmarks file is. Or if you can’t imagine, it’s 35 MB. So I had a hard time finding what was new.