The CFD world must be off to a slow start this year as evidenced by the relatively low number of news items in this week’s roundup. But there are two talks worth listening to. The first is by Donald Knuth on the art of programming and the second is by Patrick Winston on giving a presentation. Shown here are contours of the Q-criterion colored by Mach number around NASA’s CRM as computed by an LES method on a mesh of polynomial degree 3.

Almost All the News

• What happens when you run LES on a RANS mesh? Maybe not what you think.
• CFD for skyscrapers (“proving that passive and natural [ventilation?] strategies provide the best thermal comfort”).
• Have you seen this new method for solving quadratic equations?
• When Donald Knuth speaks you should probably listen. Here he speaks on complexity and the art of programming.
• OpenCFD released OpenFOAM v1912.
• Beta CAE released v20.1.0 of their software suite.
• Alert reader Rajib shared this 1-hr video from MIT Prof. Patrick Winston on How to Speak. [A topic we can all benefit from. I’m glad he mentions the “laser pointer crime.”]
• CFD for cleanroom design.
• The top 10 posts of 2019 on FY Fluid Dynamics is led by a visualization of birdsong.

I searched the internet for “best CFD flowfield” and this was the first near the top of the list. It’s a SimScale solution for a wind turbine. source

The Rest of the News

• Pointwise is surveying the CFD community to find out how many of you are using high-order meshes, overset grids, structured grids, Cartesian grids, and how big those meshes are. In order to get a somewhat statistically valid sample size, can you please take 5-minutes to answer these questions? We’ll share the results here on the blog.
• We are now accepting applications for our summer 2020 internships. Read more here.
• Pointwise will have a strong presence at AIAA SciTech next week in Orlando including technical presentations, a booth in the exhibit hall, and a fun reception co-hosted with our friends from Tecplot and FieldView.
• This is so new it’s not even on our website yet, but Pointwise has an opening for a full-time Software Engineer with expertise and interest in computational geometry, especially discrete or faceted geometry.
  • Update: It’s now on our website’s Careers page.

Face to Face with Meshing

Thanks to alert reader Daniel, I was introduced to the work of Kumi Yamashita. Her body of work includes a series of portraits done using thread – a single thread – looped around nails embedded in a white panel. What amazes me about these portraits is balance between the attention to fine detail as nails are added and the thread loops around them while not losing the bigger picture.

Kumi Yamashita, Constellation – Mana No. 2 (detail), 2013. See link above.