This week’s CFD news begins with announcements of several online events that are replacing in-person events. AI shows up twice, as an application and a product announcement. Plenty of CFD for beginners resources are referenced. And three good long-ish articles including one on the most important element in CFD. Try to guess what it is before you scroll down. Shown here is an Altair simulation done using ultraFluidX.

Events

• IGA 2020 has been postponed for two years until 6-9 Nov 2022.
• Onshape is running a survey on the State of Product Design and Hardware Development. There are prizes. So why not take a few minutes to share your opinions?
• ANSYS’ Simulation World free, online event is coming on 10-11 June.
• The LS-DYNA Conference 2020 free online event is coming on 10-11 June.
• Altair’s 2020 Global Experience free, online event is coming on 3-4 June.
• The HOOPS Virtual Summit Series is upon us with two events remaining:
  • Building the Digital Factory on 27 May
  • Manufacturing in the Digital Factory on 03 June
• [Note: I don’t typically mention online events like webinars and things but because we won’t be having conferences for a while IRL (or in “meat space” as the kids say), I’ll be including more of them.]

Pointwise

• One of our most popular webinars ever, the recording of Solution-Based Mesh Adaptation with Pointwise and ANSYS CFX is available for you to enjoy at your leisure.
• This case study describes how ENGYS used Pointwise and HELYX Adjoint to optimize the shape of automotive components.
• The introductory, free period for our new Pointwise Mesh Generation Foundations online course expires at the end of May.

Applications

• Seoul National University is applying CFD to helicopter rotor blades.
• Tecplot posted the first in a series of articles on visualization of results from high-order CFD solvers.
• I suppose when you’re Bentley, news of your use of CFD to design an add-on styling kit for your cars gets repeated over and over and over and…
• zCFD is being used for AI-based research into maximizing wind power.
• CFD was used during building design to reduce energy consumption.

ARES Design used CFD to model their reimagining of the 1970s Pantera, the Panther ProgettoUno. I applaud this flow viz for not being the sickly yellow green that we’ve all become numb to. And by “all” I mean me.

CFD 101

• Datawave Marine Solutions posted the introductory video What is CFD? One of the relative “bad” things cited about CFD is, unlike experiments, there’s little standardization which makes comparison of various methods difficult.
• The All About CFD blog shares a list of CFD resources for beginners.
• And from All About CFD’s article I learned about Vishal Sharma’s “blog series on learning the art of CFD.”
• How about a History of Fluid Mechanics?
• The SOLIDWORKS blog shares a series on The Value of Simulation.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK. From Andrew Higgins on Twitter comes this brilliant analysis of exactly how fast the eagle in the USPS’ logo is moving. 

Good Reads

• Altair’s use of GPU computing power to accelerate simulation is described in Forbes magazine.
• CFD is mentioned in this long-ish article on the digitalization of the aerospace industry including digital threads and twins. Coincidentally, lack of standardization is cited as a barrier to digital twins.
• What’s the most important element in CFD? [No, it’s not the tetrahedron.] CFD Support’s Lubos Pirkl makes the case that it’s people. Toward the end of his article you’ll read “CFD is not a girl for one night. CFD is rather like a marriage.” [I’ll resist the temptation to expand on that analogy.] This demonstrate’s Lubos’ love of CFD. Yet I’m willing to bet there’s a lot to be gained by removing some of the romance.

Welcome to the United States of Voronoi.

Software

• byteLAKE announced their AI for CFD project with a scheduled launch of November 2020.
• Parasolid V32.1 was released with lattices as a geometry type to support additive manufacturing.
• lbmpy v0.2.12 seems to be available. [I write “seems to be” because I lost the context where I found this URL and let’s just say the site is a bit light on details. I’m guessing something about Lattice-Boltzmann methods in a Python framework. And I sure hope they pronounce their acronym like “lumpy.”]
• Beta CAE released v20.0.4 of their suite.
• And there’s freeCappuccino, an open source CFD code and library.
• NOGRID points release 6.7.3 is now available.

A Faceted Alternative

Thanks to alert reader Mike for introducing me to Norwegian artist Espen Kluge and his portraiture series Alternatives, an example of which is shown below. From what I’ve been able to learn, this is programmatic or generative art based on digital photographs and the title Alternatives hints at the artist’s desire to find an alternative narrative beyond the photo of the person.

Espen Kluge, from the Alternatives series. Image from artist’s website. See link above.