In today’s CFD news there are two articles you should read and comment on. One is about heat transfer, the other about fluid rotation. A couple more events bit the dust but the CFD world spins onward with software releases and applications. Shown here is an image from a Simulia blog post about virtual driving simulators.

New from Pointwise

• Our recently launched on-line training course, Pointwise Mesh Generation Foundations, will remain free through May.
• To learn more about our online training, join two of our engineers for an Online Training Walkthrough and Live Q&A on 12 May.

Things for Reading and Thinking

• You were taught wrong in engineering school about heat transfer between a flat surface and a flowing fluid. [Hint: They forgot boundary layer transition.]
• Here is a video on lessons learned on programming for exascale on Argonne’s Aurora exascale computer.
• An introduction to CFD on AWS. [Includes link to $100 AWS credit.]
• “The discovery of Liutex [a new physical quantity describing fluid rotation] probably is one of the most important breakthroughs in modern fluid dynamics.” Judge for yourself here.
• nTopology recently held a webinar during which they discussed using “the results of the simulations in your native FEA software to drive your CAD geometry and create advanced structures.” That’s intriguing.

Events, Jobs, and Software

• The Isogeometric Analysis Conference IGA 2020 has been postponed to 2021.
• SIGGRAPH 2020 will now be a virtual event.
• The call for papers for AIAA SciTech 2021 is open with a rapidly approaching due date of 08 June.
• Flow Science has openings for an HPC Developer and a CFD Engineer.
• SU2 v7.0.4 is now available.
• TotalCAE Platform 2020 has been released.

Our friends at CAESES shared a case study of optimizing a bicycle rim shape.

News and Applications

• ANSYS announced they are the exclusive simulation sponsor of the Indy Autonomous Challenge, a university competition to demonstrate the ability to autonomously race cars around the track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
• If you own a Bentley and want to make it sportier looking, you can add a styling kit that was design with CFD.
• CFD for energy efficient operation of ships.
• Simulia shared how early-stage simulation and MDO can be used in a driving simulator to assess vehicle performance before building a physical prototype. [Back in the 1980s, my boss would say that his vision of CFD is that it’s built into the flight simulator and you just start flying and the CFD computes what the aircraft would do. We laughed. I guess he was right.]

Between Representation and Abstraction

You’re likely familiar with Piet Mondrian’s signature works. But you might not be familiar with some of his early, representational works. His work evolved from representation to abstraction and a painting like Still Life with Gingerpot II [Should’ve been called De Stijl Life with Gingerpot. Sorry, art joke.] shown below captures a time during that transition.

The takeaway is that abstraction often contains representation and is more a way of perceiving reality than a nullification of it.

Piet Mondrian, Still Life with Ginger Pot II. source

P.S. There was more CFD news to share but an operating system issue with my laptop after a recent ill-advised software install has left me with the need to perform some surgery.