It must be the season for CFD contests as ANSYS just opened submissions for their hall of fame, EDEM announced winners of their viz contest, and there’s still time to enter your mesh for Pointwise’s The Meshy. Maybe as a counter to our recent post about the Red Bull Air Race, Tecplot Chorus shares how it was used for Formula 1 racing (as shown here). And, did you hear that Pointwise is hiring?  

From Pointwise

• Registration is open for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2018 in Fort Worth on 14-15 November. A full day of seminars on the latest updates to the software and a full day of presentations on meshing applications and future developments.
• Next week Pointwise will be in Hamburg, Germany for a 1-day workshop on Marine and Wind Energy Applications of CFD. Last minute registrations are being accepted.
• We’re hiring for two open positions on our Technical Sales team:
  • Applications Engineer
  • Associate Sales Representative

Software

• After partnering for two years, Flow-Kit has agreed to be acquired by Numeca. The former’s Palabos Lattice Boltzmann solver is now the latter’s OMNIS/LB.
• Altair open-sourced its OpenMatrix Language (OML) and launched three free versions of their model-based development software products.
• Tecplot Chorus 2016 Release 2 was launched with improvements in CSV file loading and surrogate model performance.
  • See how Tecplot Chorus was used to study the wakes of Formula 1 cars.
• How to compute the area of a triangle given only it’s 3 points.
• ENGYS released HELYX v3.1.0.

Contests

My favorite winner from EDEM’s viz contest (see link below) is this simulation of a rotary soil tiller from the Univ. of South Australia. Image from edemsimulation.com.

• Submissions are being accepted through 26 September for The Meshy Award, presented to the mesh generated in Pointwise that best exemplifies visual appeal, originality, and uniqueness.
• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for June 2018.
• It’s time to enter the 10th Annual ANSYS Hall of Fame Competition. Submit your images or videos created with ANSYS’ software by 05 November for a chance to be recognized.
• Winners of the EDEM Visualization Contest 2018 have been announced, celebrating simulation expertise in application of EDEM’s discrete element modeling technology.
• How can machine learning improve aerodynamic testing for airplanes? This is the essence of the UK and Canada AI Innovation Challenge and in particular they seek methods for video processing of icing tests for Bombardier. The open call closes on 05 October.

My favorite from ANSYS’ 2018 Hall of Fame: academic best-in-show winner FTGM for this aneurysm simulation. Image from ansys.com. See link above.

Events

• Abstracts are due 21 November 2018 for the NAFEMS World Congress 2019 to be held in Quebec City on 17-20 June 2019.
• The call for papers for AIAA Aviation 2019 [in that city close to Fort Worth] is open with a due date of 07 November.
• The SIAM Conference on Computational Geometric Design will be held in Vancouver on 17-19 June 2019.
• The 2nd AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop will be held in San Diego on 5-6 January 2019 prior to AIAA SciTech. Due date for the workshop’s cases is 29 October and AIAA will be opening formal registration soon.

How expensive is it to be an engineer?

Does engineering really come with the highest amount of personal expenses of any job? That’s the conclusion of a study by CV-Library as reported by DEVELOP3D. Now I’m not picking on the reporting by DEVELOP3D but rather the conclusions of the study. Here are the top work-related expenses reported by the study’s participants.

• Commuting. [Not a work-related expense, at least in the U.S. as per the IRS where it cannot be written off as a business expense.]
• Lunch. [Not a work-related expense, IMO. You’d be eating lunch regardless of where you worked or whether you worked at all.]
• Clothes/Uniform. [I interpret “clothes” as what you choose to wear to work and “uniform” as what you’re required to wear to work. The latter is a business expense, the former is not.]
• Morning coffee. [Gimme a break. No way.]
• Workplace snacks. [In general, I agree it’d be nice if your workplace would provide food and drink throughout the day.]

Given  what I’ve seen here in the U.S., public school teachers at the elementary and secondary levels may have the highest level of actual work-related expenses they pay out of their own pockets to outfit their classrooms.

Maybe a better measure of this study would be the ratio of personally-paid, work-related expenses [assuming we could agree on a definition of what qualified] to average or median salary in that profession.

I really don’t think this article will garner any sympathy from folks outside engineering.

And while we’re on the topic, aerospace engineering is the 6th highest paid branch of engineering as per this article from GrabCAD on the 10 highest paying engineering degrees.

Applications

Screen capture from a video illustrating how machine learning can provide instantaneous CFD. See link below.

• CFD was used to design a magmeter.
• Here’s an application of machine learning to CFD.
• Machine learning and CFD show up together again in this announcement of a partnership between McLaren Racing and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
• Applied CCM has an opening for a CFD Modeller in Melbourne, Australia.
• Intel is working on an exascale chip called a dataflow engine that would do away with X86. [I lack the computer expertise to understand exactly what this means.]

Forget Polyhedra: Curvahedra

From the “I wish I had thought of that” category comes Curvahedra, “the next generation of puzzle.”

More to follow.

Curvahedra. Image from curvahedra.com. See link above.

Bonus: Congratulations to “scientist, artist, programmer” Mark J. Stock for having his hour-long video Mixing Simulation #155 chosen as one of the pieces curated by Boston Cyberarts for the lobby of the office tower at 100 Federal Street in Boston.

Mark J. Stock, Mixing Simulation #155. Image from bostoncyberarts.org. See link above.

Alert reader Carolyn pointed out that I had forgotten to include a reminder about the 2nd AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop so I updated this post after its initial publication.