This week’s CFD news may take you some time to get through because it includes several worthwhile, long reads. One is about simulation driven design and democratization, three are about computing including HPC, GPU, and AWS, and another fluid mystery has been solved. Shown here is a teaser of Image of the Week, a CFD solution of an air taxi done by NASA.

From Pointwise

• Join us next Tuesday, June 23rd, at 10:00 a.m. (central) for a webinar with Dr. Amine Ben Haj Ali from Bombardier during which we discuss how he automated the generation of over a quarter million high-fidelity meshes since 2017. (Registration required.)
• Maybe you’re interested in the performance of marine propellers.
• Or optimization of automotive components.
• UAV icing?

Using the MARS Meshing & Adaptive Re-meshing Server, Bombardier engineers automatically generate more than 100,00 high-quality meshes per year. See link to webinar above.

Worthwhile Reading

• Jumpstarting Simulation-Driven Design, an article in Digital Engineering, is very much worth your time. It focuses on technologies and techniques for moving simulation to the early stages of the design process where it can be most impactful. Basically, it’s about various approaches to democratizing simulation. [Yes, the “D” word.]
• I won’t claim to understand all of the tech cited in A New Era in High Performance Computing, but the idea of HPC systems that need to be flexible and evolvable (versus the old way of buying a system and simply using and maintaining it until it was obsolete in five years) makes sense. You also see that concept echoed elsewhere. For example, the Air Force’s NGAD program (next generation air dominance – think F-22 replacement) is discussed as a platform onto which upgrades and changes will be incorporated as they become available during production, almost a continuous upgrading.
• How to achieve 37% better price/performance when running OpenFOAM on Amazon AWS.
• It is well worth your time to spend 30 minutes with the video describing how Altair used GPUs to accelerate AcuSolve’s performance.
• Another fluid dynamics mystery bites the dust: time dependent dispersion coefficients for Taylor dispersion theory.

Screen capture from a 2-minute video introduction to the features in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ 2020.1. [I love a mesh pic and this one gets bonus points for not being sickly green.]

Blogs

• New [to me] is the CFD blog Fluid Dynamics Using the Computer.
• Truly new is AirShaper’s Passion for Aerodynamics blog.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK. Vortices and pressure waves for an air taxi concept with side-by-side rotors. CFD by NASA. Image from Aerospace America in an article about UAV noise.

Miscellaneous

• On the topic of after-market, CFD-designed, 3D printed parts for your McLaren 720S, if it’s called a supercar originally how much more super can you make it? Isn’t this like putting ketchup on a Wagyu ribeye?
• ANSYS announced their Art of Simulation Image Contest 2020. Entries are due 02 October. [I’m guessing this is a rebranding of their Hall of Fame.]
• Esgee Technologies announced the release of OverViz v2.4.
• ITI released CADfix PPS Release 3 for geometry model simplification.

MSC Apex is said to have superior hex meshing capabilities due in part to having the “No. 1 CAD cleanup tool of choice.”  While the article doesn’t state as much, this image makes the hex mesh appear to be a mapped (aka structured) hex mesh. [Also, this image feels very comfortable to me and I’m wondering how many of you know why.]

More Misc.

• ESI’s 8th OpenFOAM Conference 2020 (13-15 October) is going virtual.
• CFD for “aero extensions” for a racing bike which I think are where the rider rests their forearms.
• CFD for brake cooling.
• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for March 2020.
• The latest topic in OnScale’s blog series on FEA meshing is mesh convergence.

Faceted Outlier

When considered within the context of his entire body of work, Texas painter Matt Clark’s Ahau (shown below) is an outlier. Not thematically, but expressively. He has written that his works operate as a mirror to himself and a lens to the world. And when one considers the full scope of his work, one finds canvases with a much more organic application of paint versus the hard-edged Ahau (for examples, see the artist’s website). Yet this faceted, Voronoi-like work exhibits the effects of layering and color changes that are the hallmark of his other works.

It makes one wonder, why is Ahau so unique? Is its uniqueness why the ArtSpace111 gallery features it?

Update: Matt Clark replied to an email I sent him about this work. While he agrees it was a bit of a departure from his other work, many of the techniques in it are being utilized in his new work. Originally, Ahau began by trying to imprint marks from another canvas onto this one. As that process continued, the structure of this image began to appear as well as the direction to its completion.

Matt Clark, Ahau, 2014-2015. See links above.

Bonus: The June 2020 edition of ACM’s Journal of Programming Languages has a special focus on the history of programming languages that is available, at least for the time being, at no cost. For example, the second language I was taught (in 1980) was APL (don’t laugh) and the journal includes APL since 1978. More germane to a lot of us is Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020. The rest covers Clojure through Verilog and everything (alphabetically) in between.