As 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

• As reported by Digital Engineering, CIMdata’s 2019 Simulation & Analysis Market report indicates that the simulation and analysis market grew by 13.1% from 2017 to 2018 to US$6.5 billion. The market is expected to grow at an 11.1% rate through 2023.
• Mirarco and Laurentian University have open positions for masters students in CFD and geomechanical modelling (i.e. mining applications).
• Tecplot seeks a Technical Account Manager in their Regensburg, Germany office.
• NAFEMS’ conference Simulation in the Automotive Industry: Creating the Next Generation Vehicle will be held in Troy, Michigan on 14 November.
• The latest release of Simcenter includes a new immersed boundary CFD solver.

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.

• Early registration closes 31 August.
• Hotel registration is due by 23 September.
• Research abstracts are due by 06 August.
• Entries for the technical poster and meshing contests are due 15 August.

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…

• mechanowetting. [Yes, it’s a thing.]
• energy innovation.
• pedestrian comfort and urban wind modeling.
• a supersonic car. [From CNN of all places.]
• towboats.
• electronics enclosures.

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.”

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

• For your weekend reading, Quad-Mesh Generation and Processing: A Survey. [I wish I had found this about 6 months ago.]
• Our friends at TENZOR shared their Bare Minimum Short Guide to free online CFD study.
• And our TENZOR pals share part 2 of their posts on CFD and turbulence modeling.
  • I love the Philippe Spalart quote that leads off the article: “It’s easy to explain how a rocket works, but explaining how a wing works takes a rocket scientist.”
• Conference proceedings from the FLOW-3D European Users Conference 2019 are available for download and reading.

Survey and Events

• Take a few minutes to contribute to Tech-Clarity’s new CAD survey. You’ll get a free copy of the final report if you do. Plus you might win a prize.
• Not much time to plan travel since the event is next week, but if you’re in Novosibirsk next week you can attend the International Conference on Mathematics and its Applications, notable for honoring the 90th birthday of Sergei Gudonov.
• Pointwise for Automotive Workshop, 14 November, Munich
  • Spend the day with us seeing how we mesh both internal and external geometries for automobile aerodynamics.
• Pointwise for Marine Workshop, 12 November, Hamburg
  • Spend the day with us seeing how we mesh ship hulls and propellers.

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, 1984/92. See links above. Image from the artist’s website.

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