This week’s CFD news starts with an intriguing article about posits, an alternative to floating point numbers that are said to provide faster and more accurate computations. Coming soon to a computer near you? There are several very cool articles about applied CFD including the one illustrated here from Georgia Tech about simulation of turbulence, combustion, and heat transfer. Also, what do you know about the guts of CFD?

News & Jobs

• Article of the week: floats versus posits. Can computations be made faster and more precise by replacing floating point numbers with posits?
• I am intrigued by Datawave Marine Solutions’ new video series, The Guts of CFD.
  • Part 1: The Navier-Stokes Equations
  • Part 2: Transport Equation
• Tata Technologies has an opening for a Technical Lead – CFD
• The Mathematics Dept. at the University of Warwick seeks a Research Fellow in the Computational Modelling of 3D Interfacial Flow Instabilities.
• Jimmy Lea in Sydney wants to hire a CFD simulation specialist.

CFD simulation of a greenhouse module for a lunar base. Image from enginesoftusa.com.

CFD for…

• turbulence and combustion.
• a Porsche GT4.
• chemical reactors.

From Pointwise

• A case study: Using CFD to Help Increase the Safety of Driverless Cars. Thank you to author Khalid Khalil.
• Our events during July 2019:
  • We’ll be in India for KFour Metrics’ Let’s Talk Meshing Workshop in Bangalore on the 18th.
  • We’ll be presenting “Meshing Strategies for an FDA Benchmark Blood Pump and the Potential Impact on Solution Accuracy” at the OpenFOAM Workshop in Duisburg, Germany.
  • We’ll be presenting two papers at the U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics in Austin: “Mixed-Order Mesh Generation for Curved Geometries” and “Approaches to H and H-P Adaptation and Computational Geometry Access.”
  • See our website for more events.

In the future, cars will be designed with the mesh as an integral component. At least that’s how I interpret this image. Screen capture from the video BMW Vision Next 100.

Events

• ISimT-19, the 2019 Symposium on Innovative Simulations in Turbomachinery, will be held in Schloss Hohenkammer, Germany on 19-20 November.
• There aren’t many details yet but the 2020 edition of the Overset Grid Symposium will be held at NASA Langley in Virginia.
• The Numeca International User Meeting 2019 will be held on 12-14 November in Brussels.
• ESI’s 7th OpenFOAM Conference 2019 is coming up on 15-17 October in Berlin.

I love a good mesh pic. This one is from Altair’s OptiStruct in an article about the use of GPUs in simulation. Image from digitalengineering247.com.

Software

• libfive is a “software library and set of tools for solid modeling, especially suited for parametric and procedural design.” [It appears to be based on constructive solid geometry, CSG.]
• Kitware’s CMB (computational model builder) is a framework that “leverages several powerful open-source tools and integrates them into an application framework that can be easily adapted to specific problem domains.”
• PreCICE v.1.5.2 was released. It’s a “coupling library for partitioned multi-physics simulations.”
• ParaView 5.6.1 was released.
• SolidWorks [SOLIDWORKS? Solidworks?] 2020 Beta is ready for you to test.
• Hawk Ridge Systems wrote an introduction to SIMULIA XFlow, a Lattice-Boltzmann CFD code.
• OpenFOAM 7 was released.

Weird Shoe Science

As a break from my often forced attempts to relate art to meshing and CFD, here are two reports from the fringes of science. After all, just one article in a week about shoes is an oddity. But two are a trend.

Have you ever wondered why shoelaces come untied? Scientists did and contrary to popular belief they found that rather than loosening slowly over time a knot’s failure is rapid and catastrophic.

Screen capture from a video at curiosity.com showing in slow motion how shoelaces come untied.

Given that I just had my coffee before starting to write this blog post, it was coincidental that I saw DEVELOP3D’s article about the benefits of shoes made from recycled coffee. I had to think for a minute exactly what they meant by recycled coffee but after getting over that mental hurdle I read that coffee yarn is antibacterial and tends to vent odors better that conventional materials.

Shoes made from recycled coffee. Image from develop3d.com. See link above.