Jobs, internships, and events seem to be the order of the week with lots of hiring and lots of announced CFD and meshing conferences. From the long-read department comes several articles on shape optimization, open-source, and geometry modeling issues. And there’s a nice article on something from the CFD toolchain that gets less recognition than meshing: overset grid assembly, this time in the form of NASA’s Pegasus 5. The image here is from that article.

Good Reads

• The GridPro blog shares Shape Optimization for CFD-101 in which various approaches (parameter based, deformation, morphing, topology, etc.) are described. [This article applies yet another name to design software focused on simulation, “upfront CAD,” to be added to preCAD and aCAD (analysis CAD).]
• On a related note, see the Aerodynamic Shape Optimization: A Practical Guide from CAESES.
• Research seems to indicate that crowds of people move in ways that can be modeled accurately with hydrodynamic theory [but this article from Psychology Today lacks any of the details of that theory.]
• Research from MIT on the conversion of a 3-D model to a constructive solid geometry feature tree: InverseCSG.
• SimScale asks How Reliable is Open Source Software for CAE? [My answer is “very” and “not at all.” Those answers are the same for proprietary software. The answer also depends heavily on whether the user has performed the requisite V&V. Also, IMO “open source,” in all its various incarnations noted in the article, is not a religion; it’s a business model.]
• Learn more about Pointwise’s mesh curving and degree elevation technology in the on-demand webinar High-Order Mesh Generation.

CFD-computed streamlines around an F-1 car from an article about Renault’s approach to aerodynamics. Image from f1i.com.

Events

• The 15th U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics (USNCCM) will be held in Austin, Texas on 28 July – 01 August.
  • A mini-symposium at USNCCM: Unstructured Mesh Adaptation for CFD
  • Another mini-symposium at USNCCM: MeshTrends – Trends in Unstructured Mesh Generation
• The Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing will be held in Milan on 8-10 July 2019. The call for papers is open and your abstract is due by 05 April.
• Registration is open for this year’s 3D Collaboration and Interoperability Congress. It will be held in Golden, Colorado on 8-10 October.
• The FLOW-3D European Users Conference will also be in Milan on 3-5 June 2019. Your abstract is due by 19 April
• Salome-meca Users’ Day 2019 will be held at EDF Lab Paris-Saclay on 14 March.
• The 4th Annual SU2 Developers Meeting will be held in Varenna, Italy on 8-10 May 2019. [Italy seems to be quite the draw for CFD conferences.]
• The 3rd CFDEM Conference 2019 will be held on 14-15 March in Linz, Austria.
• ESI’s 7th OpenFOAM Conference 2019 will be in Berlin on 15-17 October. Due date for abstracts is 30 May.

Simulating daylight in the cloud. [Sounds contradictory.] Image from ladybug.tools.

Jobs

• Pointwise seeks an engineer for our technical support team. New or soon-to-be graduates are encouraged to apply.
• Pointwise also has two internship openings for this summer on our product development and applied research teams.
• Coreform has several open positions including an FEA researcher and a mesh processing expert.
• Not a job per se but Lockheed Martin will be awarding 200 STEM scholarships of up to $10,000 each that are renewable each year.
• Tech Soft 3D has several open positions including a consulting engineer and a “developer learning engineer.”

NASA CFD simulation of the Orion Launch Abort System in which Pegasus 5 was used to pre-process the overset grids (aka overset grid assembly or “hole cutter”). Image from techbriefs.com.

News

• At Imperial College London, the Matar Fluids Group is employing virtual reality to enhance students’ understanding of fluid dynamics.
• Last week I mentioned the new website for CREATE Genesis, a suite of CFD tools from the HPCMP for educational use. This week I’m still waiting for the promised new website for their full suite of tools, http://www.hpcmpcreate.org/, to come online. Until such time we have to content ourselves with the government site for CREATE – HPCpublic.
• Stanford’s Center for Turbulence Research published the research results from their summer 2018 program on Studying Turbulence Using Numerical Simulation Databases.

Computing & Visualization

• Los Alamos National Lab has launched the Efficient Mission Centric Computing Consortium (EMC3) with the goal of building ultra-scale systems that aren’t just “Linpack killers” but are actually focused on solving sparse, unstructured problems.
• Airbus has launched the Quantum Computing Challenge and one of the five problems is CFD, specifically “This challenge aims to show how established CFD simulations can be run using a quantum computing algorithm or in a hybrid quantum-traditional way for faster problem solving and how the algorithm can scale in line with the problem complexity including computational resources.”
• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for November 2018.

CFD for…

• CFD for bicycle helmets.
• CFD for superyachts. [Not just your everyday yachts.]
• CFD for tall buildings.
• CFD for catamarans.
• CFD for motorcycles.
• CFD for cars.

Disrupting the Grid

According to the exhibition write-up from the Nina Johnson Gallery from which I discovered Joshua Abelow‘s geometric paintings, he likes to setup a system of producing art and then disrupt that system by breaking the context. The grid-based work shown below is one of the less disruptive so I urge you to click the link and see more of Abelow’s work. I can’t help but see the planform of the B-2 in the lower left.

Who isn’t trying to disrupt the system of creating a grid?

Joshua Abelow, Untitled, 2017. Image from ninajohnson.com. See links above.

Bonus: What do shoelaces have to do with finding the area of a polygon given its vertices?

What’s the area of this polygon? Image from futilitycloset.com. See link above.