Did you catch the CFD shown on-air during the Super Bowl broadcast? It’s included in this week’s roundup of CFD news. And there are a few bigger science issues such as why airplanes fly, viscous heat, and exactly how old is trigonometry. Don’t worry – there’s the usual roundup of CFD applications, software releases, and job postings. The image shown here is an impeller designed in nTop Platform from a DEVELOP3D article of the need for improved tools for the future of manufacturing.

Events

• The ASSESS Congress 2020 will be held 2-4 November in Braselton, Georgia and registration will open in March.
• Registration for the SU2 Conference 2020 is now open for the event to be held at Princeton on 10-12 June.
• The 2020 Digital Twins Forum, held by the ASSESS Initiative and Georgia Tech’s Aerospace Design Systems Lab, will be held in Atlanta on 7-8 July.

I almost came out of my chair during the Super Bowl broadcast when this appeared on the TV screen during the airing of the NFL’s “Building a Better Game: 50,000 Plays” commercial. Anyone know anything about the CFD used here? Image is a screen capture of the video hosted at ispot.tv.

CFD Jobs

• At Pointwise
  • Software Engineer
  • Product Development Intern
  • Engineering Services Intern
• At Siemens Digital Industries Software
  • Technical Product Manager for Simcenter STAR-CCM+ “to help shape the long term strategy for meshing”
  • Technical Product Manager for CFD “to help shape the long term strategy for data analysis”
  • Software Engineer – CFD solver development
• At In Summa Innovation
  • An intern to perform CFD simulations using Software Cradle’s products.

CFD for…

• Felt’s AR racing bike.
• aircraft interiors. [OK, not really CFD but still a worthy read.]
• minimizing the effect of water bottle placement on racing bikes.
• biofoulingof marine ship hulls and propellers.
• pouring wine.
• buildings and infrastructure.
• espresso.
• sailing simulators.

CFD for hydrodynamic design. Image from maritime-executive.com. Full article here.

Science Conundrums

• By solving so-called “viscous heat equations,” researchers have resolved hydrodynamic heat (in which heat behaves like a fluid) with Fourier’s heat equation.
• No one [apparently] can explain why airplanes fly. In other words, what exactly generates lift?
• It seems that not only were the Babylonians doing trigonometry 1,500 years before the Greeks, they were also doing it simpler and more accurately.

AREPO is a a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation code on a fully dynamic unstructured mesh. Image from h-its.org.

Money & Recognition

• SimScale, the cloud-based simulation provider, got €27 million of funding.
• Congratulations to Dr. Scott Morton, CFDer and now AIAA Fellow.
• Lockheed Martin’s STEM Scholarship is accepting applications until 12 March. [Please share this with your STEM student friends.]

Shown here are structured hex grids for an aneurysm generated by GridPro. In the article, GridPro reports that an unstructured mesh required 13x more cells than a structured grid to achieve a mesh independent solution. Image from gridpro.com.

Software

• xNURBS V3, a Rhino plugin, is now available.
• Very nice article from DEVELOP3D by nTopology’s CEO on why design software needs to change for the new world of manufacturing.
• Lattice Technologies’ XVL Web3D Manager is a browser-based viewer for virtually any 3D geometry model.
• GrabCAD makes the case why you shouldn’t use STL files for 3D printing and it reads like what we might write about why STLs are bad for CFD geometry models.
  • Oddly, they don’t mention that STLs often present more “topological challenges” [I’m trying to be polite] than the B-Rep NURBS they are intended to replace.
  • To a certain degree, STLs are now like IGES in the sense that readers and writers are “flavored” to certain dialects of the file format. For example, support for color which is mentioned in the article isn’t part of the standard.
• Engineering.com reports on the best free software for students. [I question what constitutes “best.”]
• 3D Sculptor is a web-based subdivision surface modeling solution from SolidWorks.
• ParaView can now visualize high-order simulation results using a plugin based on Gmsh.
• Tecplot has launched a series of blog posts describing how they’re working on high-order visualization.
• Onshape makes the case for why you want CAE inside your CAD. Reason #4: Reduces cost.
• New [to me] is UCNS3D from Cranfield University.

ANSYS 2020 R1 was released with way too many new and updated capabilities to list here. Fluent’s new workflow was shown to be 25% faster in some cases. Read more here. Image from ansys.com. This image has nothing to do with fluids and everything to do with semiconductors but I thought it was pretty.

Hardware

• Engineering.com with help from ANSYS asks and answers the question “What computer hardware is best for simulation?”
  • I learned about a Windows-based desktop system that can run you anywhere from $8,000 to $50,000.
  • A recent ANSYS survey found that the average simulation workstation has 12 compute cores. This jives somewhat with our recent survey for meshing workstations in which 43% of respondents reported in excess of 16 cores.
• A brief overview of CFD in the cloud.

Overset Meshes

Samantha Bittman’s multi-faceted (pardon the pun) work involves painting over a hand-woven fabric. In the case of Untitled (below) it’s a mesh of triangles on top of a mesh of threads. Certainly this is how meshes start to look after debugging mesh generation software for several hours. However, Bittman approaches this as a way to combine the hand-crafted with the digital, the ancient with the modern. Be certain to check out more of her work at the artist’s website.

Samantha Bittman, Untitled, 2017. source