This week’s CFD news is exploding with applications including ones with cool or curious imagery. And on the topic of curiosities to ponder, read whether 3MF is the new STL. Shown here is a CFD simulation of flow around a building computed on GPUs.
Headings?
- Join Pointwise next week for a live, Let’s Talk Meshing Q&A webinar on mesh adapation.
- The GTU is a new, open, parametric, automotive benchmark case developed by Ford for pickup trucks and SUVs. According to the paper, the model(s) will be shared with the community on the ECARA website.
- Flow Science has a job opening for an HPC/Cloud Engineer.
- Imperial College London has an opening for a Research Assistant/Associate in exascale computing for turbulent flows.
- Tomer Avraham’s All About CFD Blog now has an index of articles. [Thanks for recommending AFM and This Week in CFD.]
- Tecplot shows how to extract just the data you want from a 3D dataset.

Click through and read the article otherwise you’ll never guess how much fuel is saved when you stow the wiper blades vertically versus horizontally on a KC-135. But try to guess anyway before you go to the article – percent fuel saved at cruise. Image from af.mil. [Also, this is a funky visualization and it’s unclear what we’re looking at.]
We don’t need no…
- Watch Pointwise’s on-demand webinar with Phoenix Integration on optimization of a race car’s front wing.
- The 14th International Symposium SYMKOM 2020 IMP2 (on turbomachinery, wind energy, and flow modeling) will be held on 21-23 October in Gdansk. The call for papers is open and your abstract is due by 15 May.
- Tech-X, physics simulation software, offers VSim for electromagnetics and plasma simulation, USim for fluid plasma modeling, and more.
- Effect of fan installation on its efficiency.
- CFD for the Boardman SLR 8.9c bicycle.
- Code_Saturne and Neptune_CFD now have have a presence on YouTube and LinkedIn.
- New [to me] in the blogging world is CFD and Coffee.

CFD simulation of how the splitter plate manages which flow goes under the Brabham BT62. Image from racetechmag.com.
…stinking headings.
- Demand has been “off the chain” [as the kids say] for the new, online training course Pointwise Mesh Generation Foundations. It’s free through April.
- A report from NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference focused on ray tracing and VR in CAD software but did mention some GPU-accelerated CFD from Zenotech.
- The preCICE website and documentation are being restructured and reorganized. (Reminder: preCICE is a coupling library for partitioned multi-physics simulations.)
- Altair’s SimSolid has been integrated into the latest version of Inspire.
- Learn what it’s like to be a CFD Engineer for INEOS Team UK.
- Here’s a 4-minute video introduction to RhinoCFD 2.1.
- Is 3MF the new STL?

Simulating wing stall on DarkAero’s kit aircraft using Simscale. Image from simscale.com.
Except this one.
Certainly one of the more widely known and appreciated artists of the modern grid motif is Victor Vasarely who is credited as the founder of Op (optical) Art. Perhaps his early day job as a graphic designer is one reason why his art is so accessible. Somewhere I have covers cut from scientific magazines that feature his work. And somewhere, in a frame, is one of my earliest art purchases, a Vasarely poster.

Victor Vasarely, VP Surke, 1973.
Bonus: Quanta’s interview with Donald Knuth reveals his approach to work. “My scheduling principle is to do the thing I hate most on my to-do list. By week’s end, I’m very happy.”
Double Bonus: If Programming Languages Had Honest Slogans. For example, Python’s is “We’ve made it possible to write pseudo-code in real even if you don’t understand it. Not a semicolon or a bracket but extra whitespace is all it takes to cause chaos.”