This week’s CFD news seems to be dominated by business deals (involving FieldView, ANSYS, and more) and automotive applications. A new conference on CAE interoperability was announced for next year and I hope one of you can attend and share what happened there. Right here we have an image from an article asking “What is FEA?” 

Biz

• Intelligent Light spun-off their FieldView CFD post-processing software into a new company FieldView CFD, Inc. which was acquired by Vela Software. Vela also owns Tecplot. According to IL, they will continue to focus on “serving the CFD community with tools for data management, in situ and extract workflows, data analytics, engineering risk reduction and workflow optimization.” According to FV CFD, “Tecplot and FieldView users won’t have to choose one or the other tool but can continue to rely on both tools for their individual strengths.”
• Autodesk and ANSYS announced a collaboration to “advanc[e] simulation technologies within design and manufacturing software platforms to help professionals around the globe conceptualize, design and innovate with newfound freedom and agility.” [First PTC, now Autodesk.]

News

• Tech Clarity invites you to participate in their Future of CAD survey.
• Someone recently asked me about a good way to get an introduction to CFD and a friend had to remind me of Lorena Barba’s YouTube playlist for ME 702. [Duh. I now have that site bookmarked. Don’t forget like me.]
• All of the UberCloud newsletters are archived on their website for convenient binge-reading. Check out the October 2019 issue for an article on moving simulation to the cloud.
• Cray is developing a supercomputer using Fujitsu processors.

Software

• Spatial 2020 1.0 (which seems to target “on-demand manufacturing”) includes updates to CGM Core Modeler, 3D InterOp, and ACIS.
• Flow Science released FLOW-3D v12.0 featuring HPC capabilities.
• Dyndrite released ACE (acclerated computation engine), the world’s first GPU-accelerated geometry kernel.
• STAR-CCM+ 2019.3 includes new “3D-CAD” search capabilities that promise to reduce the time you spend manually trying to find and select entities in your geometry model.
• COMSOL Multiphysics v5.5 was released.

I don’t usually link to webinars but I think this is a really cool application: how external aerodynamics design impacts window clarity during rain. The webinar is hosted by Siemens and profiles work by Daimler.

CFD for…

• food rheology (i.e. mouth feel).
• toilets.
• tidal stream turbine wakes.
• racing bicycles.
• supercars. [Not regular cars, mind you.]
• ship hull optimization.

Events, Visualization, and Jobs

• The FLOW-3D World Users Conference 2020 will be held in Munich on 8-10 June.
• The 15th OpenFOAM Workshop will be held in Arlington, Virginia on 22-25 June 2020 and hosted by Virginia Tech.
• The 1st International Conference on CAE Interoperability will be held in Bamberg, Germany on 13-14 May 2020. The call for papers is open with a due date of 24 January.
• The 2020 Converge User Conference Europe is scheduled for 30 Mar – 03 Apr in Stuttgart.
• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for August 2019.
• Red Bull Racing seeks a Senior Aerodynamics Engineer.

This image is from an article on theansweris27.com about simulating external automotive aerodynamics with special emphasis on properly accounting for the tire contact patch. Another cool CFD application with a nice grid pic. [Two automotive CFD applications in the same post rated as cool? Am I becoming a car guy?]

Applications

• Here’s an introduction to Altair’s SimSolid and its ability to perform FEA simulations on the fully detailed CAD geometry model without simplification.
  • There’s a link in this article to a validation guide describing results that indicate SimSolid’s results are within 10% of results computed in SolidWorks. (Registration required.)
  • DEVELOP3D shares a detailed look at the benefits SimSolid can bring.
• Do you find yourself asking “What is FEA and and how does it work?” If so, there’s an article on InterestingEngineering.com you should checkout.
• This video on CFD simulation of a car [again?] was my introduction to silentdynamics and their open-source CFD framework, InsightCAE.

Flow through a static mixer computed using ANSYS software. From an introduction and overview of CFD for chemical processing. Image from chemengonline.com.

Q3 Results

• Monica Schnitger reports ANSYS’ Q3 revenue was up 18% y/y. What struck me as unusual is the fact that leased software revenue was up 64% while paid-up revenue was flat. [Monica, I hope you’re feeling better now than when you wrote that article.]
  • On a related note, this article about the 10 hottest stocks since 2000 says if you bought $100 of ANSYS stock in 2000 it’d be worth $7,956 today. That’s a higher return over the same period than Apple.
• Altair’s Q3 revenue was also up 18% with license revenue up 15%. Also noted, automative accounts for 35% of the company’s revenue.
• ESI’s Q3 revenue was up 2% with software revenue up 1%.

I don’t care that this is Ford’s “Mustang inspired SUV.” But I’d really like to know how to get my car wrapped in this mesh. Image from jalopnik.com. Go there to see more pics and the full article. Thanks to alert reader Eric for showing me this. [3 cool car things?]

A Grid – Again, Forever

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Hasn’t this grid of squares been posted here before? Yes and no. Yes, it’s a motif that several artists have explored. No, because this is the first time I’ve shared Antonieta Sosa’s work. The piece below I discovered in an Art News article about the new MoMA in New York.

I like how she describes her approach to art. “Her work is ultimately and fundamentally analytical, though often irreverent, showing in her own words, that the problem is inside herself. She believes that art is energy, and that her work emerges from the relationship between the rational and the irrational.”

Antonieta Sosa, Visual Chess, 1965. Image from artnews.com. See links above.

Bonus: Unstructured mesh generation using triangles often has us relating the triangles to circles – inscribed and circumscribed. So think about this: what arrangement of three circles inside a triangle maximizes the combined area of the circles? People have been thinking about this since 1803. Read more about Malfatti Circles.

P.S. There won’t be a This Week in CFD next week as it’s the day after Thanksgiving here in the U.S. so I’ll be recovering from my annual exercise in gluttony.