Shown here is Meshed Grains, winner of the Art of Science contest at SUNY Binghamton. It’s an image of meshed grains of polycrystalline materials. The grains can be non-uniform in size and randomly distributed. Each grain is meshed using quadratic triangular grain elements. I weep because an image this cool needs to be published in a size bigger than 300 pixels wide.  Did I just waste the entire preamble talking about mesh art? 

Business

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will acquire Cray for $1.3 billion. [This news literally arrived as I was preparing this post.]
• Our friends at ANSYS had a good Q1: $86.2 million in profit on $317.1 million in revenue.

Software

• Geometry kernels are at the core of every CAD system and most every mesh generator. A kernel does all the geometric computations like point projection, curvature evaluation, intersection, etc. Two kernels you probably know about are ACIS and Parasolid. A new-ish company with venture capital backing has launched the Dyndrite Kernel which specifically targets modern computers and modern manufacturing (i.e. 3-D printing). Read an overview on TechCrunch. Is it a long shot?
• NOGRID points 6.6.1 was released for meshless CFD. [God, it hurt to type that.]
• AirShaper gets a nice partner profile on Onshape’s website. [Extra points for their work with the Red Bull Air Race of which I am a fan.]

Well this certainly is interesting. Adrian Harwood presents a 2-D LBM Android “multi-device” flow solver. This is a screen capture from a video that I recommend you watch. There you’ll find a link to a paper with the details.

From Pointwise…

• If you’ll be attending AIAA Aviation next month in Dallas, let’s get together at:
  • A reception Sunday night to celebrate our 25th anniversary.
  • Booth #314 in the exhibition hall.
  • Three technical presentations
    • Progress in Geometry Modeling and Mesh Generation Toward the CFD Vision 2030
    • Mixed-Order Curving for Viscous Meshes
    • Summary of Exascale and Remeshing Efforts for the Second Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop
• Some notes from our visit to the SAE 2019 World Congress.

Geometry & Viz

• ICYMI, the ABC Dataset consists of one million geometry models for testing meshing algorithms and more.
• Here’s the best of the visualization web for February 2019 from our friends at Visualizing Data.

CFD for…

• Ford Mustang supercars.
• air jets to reduce drag on automobiles. [Not CFD but still interesting.]
• mixing tanks. (registration required)

Light, Water, Mesh

In CFD, a mesh is an intermediate, temporary construct on which a fluid simulation is computed. In Joanie Lemercier‘s art, the fluid (water in this case) in a construct onto which a mesh is projected in a way that suggests “the beauty of geometry, simple and complex structures of the universe.” In order to work in CFD mesh generation it certainly helps to have an appreciation for geometric beauty. And Lemercier’s comment about the simple and the complex also hits home – for what is a mesh other than a complex arrangement of simple shapes. Watch her work Constellations come to life at This Is Colossal.

Joanie Lemercier, Constellations, 2018. See links above. Image from thisiscolossal.com.