This week’s CFD news includes a lot of new events that you might want to start putting on your calendar. There are a couple of long reads on CAD and case studies and several new software releases, including one from Pointwise. But because none of the images in any of these articles excited me, I Googled for “worst CFD ever” and found this flow over the Sphinx from Symscape. (Sorry, Rich.)

Reading

• Developers of OpenQBMM (a suite of solvers to simulate polydisperse multiphase flows using Quadrature-Based Moment Methods based on OpenFOAM) are asking you to participate in a survey on applications of OpenQBMM you’re interested in, now and in the future. Take a moment and help them out.
• In the results of the Worldwide CAD Trends 2018/19 Survey you’ll see, among many other things, that the strongest future growth potential for CAD use is ML, AI, VR, AR, the cloud, and generative design.
• The UberCloud published the Compendium of Case Studies in CFD.
• The internet was all atwitter [pun intentional] about the Google Doodle featuring the Navier-Stokes equations and mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya who proved that finite difference approximations to the N-S equations would converge. ICYMI, see it in the doodle archive for 07 March 2018.

Software

Screen capture from a video describing many of the new features coming in STAR-CCM+ 2019.1. See link below.

• STAR-CCM+ 2019.1 (the first version with the Simcenter version numbering system) includes a host of new features including direct import of colors from CAD files. Read more and watch the video at the link (from which the image above was captured).
• preCISE v1.4.0 was released. (It’s a “A Coupling Library for Partitioned Multi-Physics Simulations on Massively Parallel Systems.”)
• New [to me] is M-Star CFD. [First, I’m curious how Siemens feels about use of the word STAR in the name of another CFD product. Some other folks in the CFD world would push back hard on a similarity like that. Second, they claim to be “meshless” which hurts right in the feels.]
• Pointwise V18.2 R2 was released including a native interface to the Engineering Sketch Pad conceptual design software.

Events

• The 71st HPC User Forum will be held in Santa Fe on 01-03 April.
• The Simulation Summit (29 Mar 2019 in Parma, Italy) “is the first Italian independent conference on CAE Simulation in the industrial field.” Abstracts are due by 13 March. [I blame any errors on Google translate.]
• SPHERIC 2019 (on smoothed particle hydrodynamics) will be held at the University of Exeter on 25-27 June.
• Thermoanalytics 2019 Global User Meeting is 29 Apr – 01 May in Novi, MI.
• The Workshop on Grid Generation for Numerical Computations (Tetrahedron VI) will be held outside Paris on 2-4 Oct 2019. Pointwise’s Carolyn Woeber will be one of the speakers.
• Registration is now open for the ASSESS Initiative’s 2019 Congress which will be held outside Atlanta on 27-29 October. This is an invitation-only event and instructions for obtaining an invitation are on the registration site. In case you aren’t familiar with ASSESS, it is a “broad reaching multi-industry initiative with a primary goal to facilitate a revolution of enablement that will vastly increase the availability and utility of Engineering Simulation, leading to significantly increased usage and business benefits across the full spectrum of industries, applications and users.”

As reported by The Aviationist, design of Lamborghini’s Aventador was inspired by the F-35 Lightning II as illustrated in this video. [I’d still rather fly in the plane than ride in the car.]

Applications

• The Simcenter FLOEFD has launched a video series on smart design beginning with this one on intake manifolds.
• Pointwise offers this video demonstrating of mesh generation for viscous CFD simulation of the APC Slow Flyer 8 x 3.8 model aircraft propeller.
• DEVELOP3D wrote about the launch of Creo Simulation Live which enables “live” simulation inside Creo during the design process. [I like the sentiment expressed by ANSYS’ Mark Hindsbo: “For too long, form and function have been separated in the design process.”]
• In this brief article about use of CFD to optimize a ship’s hull I learned “Ships with the fullness of a bulk carrier are difficult to analyse with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) due to a high share of viscous effects in resistance and propulsion.”

Irregular Grid

At first glance I thought this was a structured grid but upon closer inspection you can see that the structure is broken in a few places making this an unstructured quad mesh. However, Paul Klee wasn’t thinking mesh when he painted May Picture. Rather, he was inspired by the Tunisian landscape according to The Met’s website.

What I see is irregular regularity, in which the regular grid is distorted not just by the waviness of the lines but by the overtness of the brushwork. I see the use of multiples to great effect, reminiscent of Richter’s work that has been posted here previously. The color palette has the effect of softening the edges of the grid and makes me think about Josef Albers’ work.

Paul Klee, May Picture, 1925. source

Bonus: Here’s inspiration for a new Pointwise trade show booth [or stand as our European friends say] and outfits. Be certain to click through and watch the video.

Screen capture from a video of Kraftwerk performing Aero Dynamik.