For today’s post-Independence Day (in the U.S, although I guess it’s still post-yesterday everywhere) edition of This Week in CFD, we start with this unique application of CFD: studying the manner in which a 500 million year old organism fed (so-called gregarious suspension feeding, a term I’m still trying to parse). Fans of OSS will like the new release of OpenFOAM and the launch of the SU2 Foundation. Plus there’s the usual suspects: applications, software releases, and articles. 

CFD for…

• high speed boats.
• carotid arteries.
• surge vessels.
• mechanical heart valves.
• ballast water pumps.
• Formula 1.
• reconstructing precambrian paleoecology.
• cycling.
• biologging devices.
  • Here’s background info on the biologging work.

You don’t often see CFD images in Aviation Week but here are a couple from an article about how Airbus is achieving sustainability goals with the help of aerodynamics. Image from aviationweek.com.

Software

• The SU2 Foundation is a non-profit created for developing and promoting the SU2 open-source CFD code. For more details, see su2foundation.org.
• Nextflow Software introduced Nextflow Studio, an integrated environment for CFD.
• Beta CAE released v19.1.3 of their software suite.
• LEMMA has partnered with ITI for the creation of a special CFD geometry clean-up tool, CADfixforLEMMA.
• Simerics-MP+ Version 5.0 was released with a distributed, parallel solver.
• “Script-free automation” and more is coming in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ 2019.2.
• OpenCFD released OpenFOAM v1906.

Image of the week: booster separation at Mach 1.8 from an article about DLR’s efforts (including CFD) for reusability in spaceflight. image from dlr.de.

Grab Bag

• Mathematicians have proved that not all manifolds can be triangulated.
• Hopefully you’ll find that the Niagara Falls-themed case for the International Meshing Roundtable’s meshing contest can be triangulated. Intent to participate due by 15 August.
• Before you start making room in your datacenter for a quantum computer we need to figure out why they become unreliable before a typical computation is completed.
• byteLAKE has created optimized CFD kernels to accelerate CFD solution time.
• Trying to figure out exactly what IBM’s LinuxONE is and how it might be used for CFD.
• How accurate is SolidWorks Simulation for FEA?

Viz

• For you visualization mavens, the Information is Beautiful Awards are open for 2019 with entries due by 30 August.
• Here’s best of the visualization web for April 2019 from Visualizing Data.

Tecplot visualizations of carbon cycling in the Chesapeake Bay. Image from tecplot.com.

Transmitting Mesh

I’ve had Margaret Bourke-White’s 1935 photograph of the WOR Transmitting Tower hanging on my office wall for quite some time now. Best known as a pioneering photojournalist, she also (in my opinion) had a great eye for capturing technology from unique perspectives.

In WOR Transmitting Tower she manages to compress hundreds of feet of tower into something absolutely flat, or at least something ambiguous: are you looking up or down? Also, this open structure which is designed for transmitting/sharing radio broadcasts looks like a cage when viewed from below.

For more information, see her page at the International Center of Photography.

Margaret Bourke-White, WOR Radio Transmitting Tower, 1935. source

Bonus: Alert (and apparently hungry) reader Tim shared this article about the fluid dynamics of making crepes. “Just doing nothing does a reasonable job” which is kinda where I stand on the whole cooking thing.