The last two weeks of CFD news have produced a plethora of cool CFD applications from flow over landing gear to turbulence interacting with shock waves to HVAC as shown here (an ANSYS Discovery Live simulation from Leap Australia). Plus, I ask you to ponder and share what simulation tech is most important for aerospace.

Things to Ponder

• Last month was the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Gabriel Stokes.
• Because it’s the beginning of the school year, I encourage all aerospace engineering students to consider membership in their professional society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Here’s a brief video describing the benefits of student membership in AIAA. I’ve been a member since I became a freshman in 1980.
• Aerospace Testing International wrote about the top 5 simulation technologies for aerospace in 2019. I’m going to cut them a little slack despite the fact that each of their 5 technologies are based on things ANSYS is doing. I’d like to hear whether you agree with their 5 items. For example, #5 is multiphysics which I’ve been hearing about for over 25 years.

Screen capture from a video of Hexagon’s Cradle CFD software simulating the flow of diesel exhaust particle matter.

Pointwise Events

Come meet us at any (or all) of these upcoming industry events.

• Aero-sprays Workshop (we are sponsoring the workshop and attending)
• ENGYS User Group Meeting (where Dr. Rick Matus will be presenting Effect of Mesh Topology on Simulation Accuracy and Efficiency)
• Tetrahedron VI (where Carolyn Woeber will be presenting A Shared Vision for Mesh Generation)
• International Meshing Roundtable (where I will be presenting Computational Geometry and Mesh Associativity for CFD Software: MeshLink)
• International CAE Conference (we are sponsoring and attending)
• Pointwise for Marine Workshop (we are hosting)
• Pointwise for Automotive Workshop (we are hosting)

A Job and Computing

• Syracuse University (my alma mater) has an opening for tenure-track faculty in aerospace engineering.
• In the article A New Dawn for Security Vulnerabilities in HPC the case is made that we need to be more vigilant than ever in securing these systems from misuse because their esoteric-ness no longer makes them invulnerable. Notable in the article:
  • ” In 2018 there were more vulnerabilities reported in RedHat products than Microsoft.”
  • Figure 1 is one of the most awful charts I’ve ever seen.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. And I certainly didn’t expect to see CFD in a recent post from Art News. 

Software

• CFDTool v1.4 for MATLAB was released.
• Elysium released DirectTranslator EX8.1.1 for CAD file translation, validation, and simplification.
• Congratulations to our friends at Sigmetrix on their 20th anniversary. Read more here.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK. It’s from 2017 but it popped up again in my feed. NASA CFD simulation of flow over a 777’s nose gear.

Applications

• Leap Australia shares a list of four uses of CFD that are changing HVAC and construction. #3 Fire and Smoke Propagation.
• Next week TotalSim will officially open the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub, an incubator for sports engineering companies.
• CFD for ship propulsion.
• bicycle wheels.
• motorcycle helmets.

Using a supercomputer at UT Austin, researchers from Texas A&M performed detailed simulations of the interaction of turbulence with shock waves. In the left-to-right flowfield above the turbulent Q-criterion is reddish and the shock wave is the vertical blue line. Image from tacc.utexas.edu.

The Spirit of Facets

Always on the lookout for new artwork, I found myself last week in the Vivid Print gallery in Edmonton. (The reason there was no Last Week in CFD.) Like the pull of a magnet, I was drawn to Bee Waeland‘s Spirit Island shown below.

While it’s true that her use of simple, uniform, isotropic shapes (triangles, squares, and circles) to represent this landscape appeals to my fascination for facets in art, it is her color palette that has kept my attention. For lack of a better word, her colors are natural, soften the geometry, and don’t result in a moire effect in the whitespace. She describes her style as “graphic + clean with a deference for white space, kerning + all things art deco.”

The print I purchased is out for framing and will soon be on display in my office.

Bee Waeland, Spirit Island. Image from vividprint.ca. See links above.

Bonus: Only super nerds will enjoy these regular expression crossword puzzles.