With two weeks of CFD news to report, there’s more of everything from jobs to events, software releases, and cool applications. The wind turbine simulation here is from a new open-source CFD code called Nalu-Wind. Siemens released Screenplay, a cool looking tool for creating animations of your CFD results. And several articles describe the use of GPUs to accelerate CFD. After a long wait, our friends at Symscape are back with news. So let’s not prolong your wait – on with This Week in CFD.

Software

• A Siemens Visionary [and good guy] introduces us to to Screenplay, a new part of STAR-CCM+ 2019.2 for creating animations of your CFD results.
• ELEMENTS v3.0.0 was launched by Streamline Solutions and announced by ENGYS. [I’m so confused.]
• An overview of Caedium v6.0. (See more detail below.)
• The open source Nalu-Wind code is being developed by U.S. government agencies for wind power plant modeling.
• DEVELOP3D shares a look at ANSYS 2019 R2.
• QuickerSim’s CFD Toolbox v2.4 is 25% faster.
• Altair HyperWorks 2019 was released.
• Solid Edge 2020 was released.

Caedium V6.0 includes conjugate heat transfer and passive species transport shown above for a helix-fluted chimney. Image from symscape.com.

News

• Cray (now part of HP Enterprise) recently added to their trophy case at the American Business Awards.
• Pointwise is now a sponsor of Revolution in Simulation.
• For more on Rev-Sim, see this series of articles from Machine Design.
• Congratulations to our friends at ITI (known for CADfix and a lot of other tech) for being acquired by Wipro for an estimated $45 million.
• CFD Direct summarizes their fourth year of work on OpenFOAM.
• Is ANSYS’ future bright? No doubt yes. [Is simulation a religion? God no. I thought casting it as an art was bad enough. This idea of a simulation priesthood has to be exorcised. Religious puns intentional.]

Comparison of CFD (bottom) with experiment (top) for fuel rod bundles. Image from power-technology.com. [Yes, I removed the labels.]

CFD for…

• wastewater lagoons (and the odors therefrom)
• racing yachts.
• VLCCs.
• tunnels (and the ventilation thereof)
• electric aircraft.
• catamarans.
• fridge cabinets.

CFD simulation from an article about Volkswagen’s use of GPUs. Image from nvidia.com.

Applications

• Learning Three-Dimensional Flow for Interactive Aerodynamic Design (machine learning for CFD)
• Wolf Dynamics is sharing OpenFOAM validation cases.
• Digital Engineering writes about the expanding use of GPUs in product design and simulation.
• Digital Engineering also describes their walkthrough of Altair’s SIMSOLID for FEA.
• ADS CFD states their GPU speed-up at 20-300x.

Nice image of the mesh from an ANSYS simulation of wing ice accretion. Image from ansys.com.

Events

• Dassault Systemes’ 3DEXPERIENCE Modeling and Simulation Conference will be held in Novi, Michigan on 18-19 September 2019.
• The 3rd AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop will be held on 4-5 January 2020 in Orlando, the weekend prior to AIAA SciTech.
• The Siemens Digital Industries Software 2019 Simcenter Conference will be held in Amsterdam on 2-4 December. The call for papers is open and the due date for your 100-300 word abstract is 15 July 2019.
• CAASE20, NAFEM’s Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering, will be held in Indianapolis on 16-18 June 2020. The call for abstracts is open and the due date is 30 November.
• The 21st Annual CFD Symposium of the Aeronautical Society of India will be held on 8-9 August 2019 in Bangalore.
• FRAMES 2019, the 1st Workshop on Frame-Based Hex Meshing, will be held on 1-2 July in Louvain-la-Neuve.

An illustration of MSC Apex’s midsurface geometry and meshing capabilities. Image from mscsoftware.com.

Jobs

• The National Institute of Aerospace has job openings for post-docs in jet noise, numerical analysis, HPC, and more.
• Los Alamos seeks to hire a computational earth scientist. [cool job title of the week]
• Maya HTT has an opening for a CFD developer.
• Intelligent Light wants to hire a software engineer.

We’re not in Kansas anymore.

Spencer Finch’s Back to Kansas has deconstructed the sunflower state (or at least its fictional depiction in The Wizard of Oz) and dropped it into an outdoor exhibition in Arkansas.

Imagine encountering this work while strolling through the northwestern Arkansas grounds of the Crystal Bridges Museum as part of their wonderfully named Color Field exhibit. It would be quite arresting, the juxtaposition of the organic with the grid, the contrast of natural colors with those from a hyper-colorized film, the displacement of a fictional place to a real one. I can only imagine how this looks in natural light, the flatness of the image plane with the rich depth of the forest.

From a bio of the artist on Artspace, Finch’s “works operate in the gap between the objectivity of scientific data and the subjectivity of creative expression.”

Spencer Finch, Back to Kansas, installed at the Crystal Bridges Museum. Image from crystalbridges.org. See links above.