This week’s CFD news includes high-order, GPU-accelerated simulation of turbomachinery, a sports car that seems to use a crossflow jet in place of a windshield, an opportunity to win $20,000, and more. Shown here is a screen capture of a video from the new CFD code, Rhoxyz.

News

• Introducing Rhoxyz (which I’m told is pronounced like “Roxy’s”), a meshless, Lagrangian CFD code.
• Beta CAE released v20.1.1 of their software suite.
• Application of ZJ Wang’s hpMusic/GENESIS CFD code to turbomachinery applications using GPU acceleration at ORNL. [In which we read HPC described as a “crystal ball of sorts.”]
• Papers from the 10th International Conference on CFD are now available in the Journal of Computers and Fluids.

Thanks to alert reader Jeff for this t-shirt that teaches kids there’s a mesh behind everything cool.

• Submissions are now open for SC20 to be held 15-20 November in Atlanta. [Still don’t understand why they don’t call it Supercomputing anymore.]
• For you automotive mavens, the McLaren Evla will employ something called an Active Air Management System to do away with the need for a windshield. [Thanks to alert reader Mike for this tip.]
• NASA Langley is giving you the chance to compete for a $20,000 prize if you can solve their UAV safe navigation challenge.
• Tech Soft 3D released HOOPS Platforms 2020.
• Simscale is modeling trees with porous media. [In which we learn that trees have a “leaf area index.”]
• ENGYS released HELYX v3.2.1.
• CFD for cycling helmets.

Use of CFD to understand the wind at the 17th hole at Sawgrass. Image from a LinkedIn post by Aidan McLoughlin.

The Sun Still Rises

Extraordinary is an apt description for what we’re living through right now. We are in uncharted waters and each day brings yet another unsettling change. The news media have started overusing the phrase “the new normal” as though right now is forever.

It is not. To borrow a phrase from Heather Cox Richardson, “our history has been one of great promise and principle, as well as extraordinary failures at times.” Our humanity is vulnerable to weakness and failure in the same way that our human form is vulnerable to a virus. It is our legacy of promise and principle that we must draw upon to move beyond the normal now. “This country gives us the chance to write our own future,” writes Cox Richardson.

It’s too trite to hide pain and suffering behind “this won’t be easy.” Yet we should find hope that fulfillment of our promise as a people depends largely on principles that we already know.

Take care of yourself and your family with the habits we’ve all been taught – but often fail to practice. Appreciate the interconnectedness of all of us. What you do to you and yours effects me and us. Include the most vulnerable of us within your circle of care.

Yesterday on LinkedIn, Ron Fritz, Tech Soft 3D’s CEO & Co-founder, wrote that we must evolve the workplace to one that recognizes “employees are real-life, three-dimensional people with personal lives and their own array of challenges, triumphs, joys, and sorrows.” Understanding that the people we work with – not just those down the hall but those down the street and around the corner – are all striding toward the same future allows us to better support each other on our common journey. Support your favorite business, especially those small and local. Express your appreciation and gratitude to those working on the ground floor of today’s normal. Our economy is people and therefore thrives on our activity and interconnectedness.

Use your principles and learned rationality to approach tomorrow as a problem to be solved, not a prospect to be feared. Where there is solid leadership, be a good follower. In its absence, make yourself a good example.

Monet’s Impression Sunrise also deserves the label extraordinary.  It captures the stillness and peace of a new day’s beginning while simultaneously exhibiting the energy, promise, and opportunity of the future day to come. At first glance it suggests cool isolation until one realizes there are two more boats heading out and the brilliant sun is rising. Uncertain seas perhaps, but not alone.

Let’s be smart out there.

-John Chawner

Claude Monet, Impression, Soleil Levant (Impression Sunrise), 1872. From the collection of the Musee Marmottan Monet.

Bonus: Disney’s influence on stealth aircraft.