This Week in CFD

pedestrian-windAs is predictable after skipping a week, this week’s CFD news is bursting at the seams with a two-week backlog of applied CFD, software releases. job postings, event news and more. Notable are a video teaser of Simcenter’s Screenplay, bio-mimicry in the use of tubercles on wing leading edges, and a survey on CAD usage that’s worth your time to take. Shown here is a SimScale simulation of wind modelling in an urban environment.

News & Jobs

screenplay-vid-cap

Screen capture from a video demonstrating the capabilities of Simcenter’s Screenplay for creation videos of your simulations.

International Meshing Roundtable

Our friends at the IMR have a lot of reminders for this year’s event in Buffalo on 14-17 October.

Fig5-Surface-Mesh-1000x450

Read the case study Using CFD to Help Increase the Safety of Driverless Cars to learn how Pointwise’s meshing capabilities was key to being able to simulate real-life motorway conditions.

CFD for…

British-Museum-22

For reasons that should be obvious, I share this photo of the interior of the British Museum. source

Software

  • The folks at Zenotech were recognized for the Most Innovative Use of Tech at the SPARKies.  As reported here previously, one of their innovative uses of tech is the application of AI to meshing.
  • Zenotech’s hybrid open/closed source model for their ZCFD code is their attempt to balance the best of both worlds. [I could make the case that Pointwise’s Glyph scripting and Plugin SDKs provide similar benefits.]
  • Zenotech is part of a team working on a 3-year project to develop high-order CFD methods. [No, I am not stalking Zenotech.]
  • Nature’s article How to Support Open-Source Software and Stay Sane includes this comparison of proprietary and open-source tools: “It’s sort of the difference between having insurance and having a GoFundMe when their grandma goes to the hospital.”
tubercle-wings

Do not adjust your set. This image is correct. It’s from a paper by Fish [no joke] et al on wings inspired by the tubercles on a whale’s fins. Read more in the article on the GridPro blog. [How many readers get what the first sentence is all about?]

More Software

  • Kitware shares news about the addition of SPH (smoothed particle hydrodynamics) to iMSTK, their open-source toolkit for surgical simulations.
  • B-Shaper is the new polygonal-to-B-Rep model converter from C3D Labs.
  • Watch this 2-minute video of new features in Femap 2019.1.

Things to Read

Survey and Events

Complex and Thoughtful Grids

Borrowing a quote about the artist directly from a 2012 article on Art Review, Hungarian artist Dora Maurer shows that “art can be both complex and thoughtful, and yet also find a relation to everyday life.” That’s kinda like mesh generation: definitely complex, hopefully thoughtful, yet 100% practical.

Her non-photographic works explore depth and motion using a highly mathematical and geometrical language. In addition to being the only artwork I can recall finding that has the appearance of overset, body-confirming grids, Space Painting (shown below) has a restless dynamism and three-dimensionality that reminds me a bit of Frank Stella. Despite its use of relatively simple forms, the work exhibits a tension between the sweeping, in-plane movement to the upper left and a deep dive into the surface as one attempts to sort the layering of the grids. I really like this work (a silver print in gouache) a lot.

See also this interview with the artist from Studio International.

dora-maurer-space-painting

Dora Maurer, Space Painting, 1984/92. See links above. Image from the artist’s website.

Bonus: There’s a connection between beauty and numbers, art and science.

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2 Responses to This Week in CFD

  1. Thank you for mentioning our C3D B-Shaper in this Week in CFD!

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