While I continue to slog through the backlog of CFD news created by my own sloth – and many of you have pointed out that I seem to be missing the new news – there are some great items that are just a week or two old like the first exascale class computer, the beginning of a discussion of simulation-based design, and several cool applications like the one shown here from our friends at ANSYS. Try to guess what that is before you click through to the full article. You may have one in your house.

Four

• The Congress on Numerical Methods in Engineering, CMN 2019, will be held in Portugal on 1-3 July.
• Ceetron announced the release of Ceetron Cloud Components 2.5.0 for developers of visualization apps for cloud-based CAE products. [Go for news on their products, stay for the mesh motif on their website.]
• Swansea University posted their vortex lattice method source code to GitHub.
• Cray announced “the first exascale class supercomputer,” a system called Shasta. First customer will be the Dept. of Energy. [A Cray-1 and a Cray-2 were my introductions to supercomputing back in the day. Remind me sometime to tell you the story about when somebody literally vomited on one.]
  • More on Shasta from Cray.
• All the presentations from the recent Converge CFD user conference are now online.

Convergent Science announced an arrangement with Gamma Technologies whereby every GT-SUITE user gets CONVERGE Lite for free. Image from convergecfd.com. 

Three

• This is worth a watch: See a presentation/demonstration from the Altair Technology Conference 2018 on how SimSolid works.
• Over on Lifecycle Insights, Chad Jackson introduces a planned series of articles that delve into current technologies that promise to truly enable simulation-based design by leveraging teamwork and collaboration. Should be some good stuff to add to our CAE reading lists.
• The Call for Papers for AIAA Propulsion and Energy is open until 31 January 2019.
• ANSYS shared its financial numbers for 2018 Q3 during which they profited to the tune of $89 million.
• Speaking of ANSYS, their products are in use at Dyson. Being a satisfied Dyson vacuum user, this is pretty cool. [But it’s cooler to see the photo of the aircraft suspended above their employee cafeteria.]

Thanks to alert reader Chris for sharing the Wander Wood Pavilion on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The article (which includes other photographs of the work) focuses on its robotic fabrication but as you can guess I’m more curious about the design and its motivations. Image from inhabitat.com. 

Two

• From the Journal of Petroleum Technology: Flow Regime Affects Erosion Prediction in Multiphase Flow. (Registration required for full article.)
• Coreform presents a summary of the recent IGA 2018 Conference (isogeometric analysis) including the observations that “the IGA commercialization train is starting to pull out of the station” and “the most significant technical hurdle towards commercial adoption has been the lack of suitable geometry.” The latter observation is coupled with a link to a possible solution: U-Splines. [I’m still mad I had to miss that conference where I was supposed to present.]
• From the “other conferences I had to miss” department we have an Aerion Technologies perspective on the ASSESS Congress 2018.
• Speaking of Aerion, they have a couple of job openings for software engineers.
• Speaking of jobs, Numeca seeks a turbomachinery CFD development engineer.

FINE/Marine simulation of a ship’s hull from the article Unlocking the Unknown with CFD on royalihc.com. 

One

• In this interview with Drive System Design’s director of engineering I learned two things.
  • Manual transmissions [which I never learned how to use] in cars will continue to grow in overall volume but may be nearing a peak.
  • CFD hasn’t been able to function as a design tool for transmissions which is why they’re looking at particle hydrodynamic techniques.
• A NASCAR team has chosen Onshape for its design tool.
• Speaking of cars, CFD simulations of the proposed F-1 2019 designs show they’re no better than the 2018 design. [This makes me wonder why you wouldn’t do CFD on the design before you finalized it. But what do I know about cars?]
• My Italian isn’t that good but this website looks like the online home of the Code_Aster Italy user’s group.
• COMSOL Multiphysics 5.4 has LES and much, much more. [Rhyming intentional.]

Fruits, Flowers, and Tesselations

Last week I teased with a partial photograph of the work of Takehiro Kishimoto but here’s the full reveal of this Kobe-based chef’s carving of fruits and vegetables into intricate designs that are too good to eat.

The avocado shown below is the most mesh-like of his works featured in the article but it stands by itself.

A tessellated avocado by Takehiro Kishimoto. Image from colossal.com. See link above.