This week’s CFD news has meshes from top to bottom which is always a good sign. You’ll also want to take a look at Resolved Analytics’ CFD survey results. Financial results from the CAE world indicate pretty much what we all believe: Q2 will be awful and then we begin the slow climb to positive results by year’s end. Shown here is a photo-realistic rendering of CFD results from a SIMULIA article about vehicle aerodynamics.

Awards & Event

• It’s time for the CAESES Student Award 2020 so submit the work you’ve done with CAESES and early in 2021 the winners will be announced and valuable prizes awarded.
• Winners of the Simcenter FLOEFD Frontloading CFD Awards were announced with first place going to the Hager group for their use of the product in “trunking system design.” [I had to read their article in Engineer Innovation Issue 5 to learn what “trunking systems” were.]
• The agenda for the 3-day, online SU2 Conference 2020 has been posted.

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• Monica Schnitger looks at the Q1 performance and Q2 guidance from Altair, ANSYS, and ESI. Conclusions. Q2 will be bad after which they’ll climb up through Q3 and Q4 because simulation is a key to for their customers to achieve their goals. Also noted, “Signing new business is likely to remain tough since that’s often best done face-to-face.”
• Autodesk reported a revenue decrease of 1.4% relative to the prior quarter. Interesting quote: “Our investments in monetizing non-compliant users [emphasis mine], construction and manufacturing will enable us to deliver double-digit growth in the near term as well as our long-term goals.”

The Formula SAE team at Politenico di Milano used SimScale for their CFD.

Software

• I had lost track of the CFD solver Flow360 but found it again at Flexcompute where they promise you can “Solve a high-Reynolds number flow on a mesh with 50 million grid points in only 3 minutes.”
• You can download the results of Resolved Analytics’ CFD Software User Survey (registration required). Among other things, we learn that the top 3 most widely used CFD software packages are STAR+CCM+ (for its parallelism), ANSYS Fluent (for multiphysics), and OpenFOAM (because it’s inexpensive). 
• Beta CAE released v20.1.2 of their software suite.
• CFturbo 2020 R1 was released for turbomachinery design.
• Barracuda Virtual Reactor 20.0 was released for computational particle fluid dynamics simulations of fluidized reactors. This release has Tecplot for Barracuda bundled in.
• On a related note, here’s a video Getting Started with Tecplot for Barracuda.

Applications

• Simulation for Vehicle Aerodynamics by Simulia.
• In F-1, the farther back in the rankings you are the more CFD time you get.

Pointwise Applications

• Prerecorded webinar: Simulation of In-Flight Icing on UAVs with neptech’s Faranggis Bagheri and NNTU’s Richard Hann.
• Webinar recording: Solution-Based Mesh Adaptation with Pointwise and ANSYS CFX with ISimQ’s Paul Galpin
• Case study: Car Park Ventilation CFD with Pointwise, Caelus, CFX, and FDS by Applied CCM’s Martin Leahy

Meshes

Our friends at ANSYS share 5 best practices for gas turbine combustor meshing.  Step 1: start with a watertight geometry model.

• From a paper due to be published in July 2020 we find fTetWild, a new tet mesher that “converts triangle soups into high-quality tetrahedral meshes.” (PDF)
• Learn how to create a quad dominant mesh from any input object in Rhino using QuadRemesh.
• ICYMI, here’s the “what’s new” video for Simcenter Femap 2020.

Mechanism to Romance, Mesh to Results

Richard Anuszkiewicz, who recently passed away at age 89, said “I’m interested in making something romantic out of a very, very mechanistic geometry.” A pioneer of Op (Optical) Art, he created a multi-decade body of work expressed in painting, sculpture, and more that you can enjoy on his website.

The analogy with mesh generation is obvious. We also generate something geometric and mechanistic so that flow solvers can compute something romantic and insightful on it. Even my “never make a mesh again” friends at Convergent Science might make an exception for Quartered Red‘s adaptive mesh refinement shown below.

You can read more about his life in ARTnews’ announcement of his passing.

Richard Anuszkiewicz, Quartered Red, 1977. Image from artist’s website. See links above.

Bonus: ICYMI, the video If Rockets Were Transparent is a real-time simulation of fuel burn and staging for four space launch vehicles.

Bonus 2: Tessellate your houseplants’ root systems.