This week’s news is highly visual with cool images of various solutions and grids. What’s new are a couple of insightful interviews with CAE folks. And how about a job in quantum computing for CFD? Shown here is an example of the new adaptive mesh refinement for reacting flows in STAR-CCM+ 2020.2.

People

• A nice profile on OpenQBMM, open-source CFD software related to OpenFOAM for multiphase flows, and its creator, Dr. Alberto Passalacqua.
• nTopology interviewed Dr. Andreas Vlahinos on innovation.
• Robin Knowles launched On CFD, a new newsletter from CFD Engine.

Simulation of a centrifugal compressor by CFD Support. Image from cfdsupport.com.

Software

• MSC’s customers can now access MSC’s partner’s software products through the MSCOne^XT token-based product access platform.
• Flow Science released FLOW-3D CAST v5.1.
• HPC company PSSC Labs writes that they have yet to find a negative aspect to STAR-CCM+ while Fluent is dinged for its cost and the need for standalone pre- and post-processing software.
• What’s new in STAR-CCM+ 2020.2?

Gas concentration in a water jacket sand core computed with FLOW-3D CAST v5.1. Image from flow3d.com.

CFD for…

• grain silo monitoring.
• transport barges.
• peristaltic pumps.
• climbing bikes.
• glass making.
• rim thrusters.

Abaqus mesh of a peristaltic pump. See link above.

Jobs

• ReactiveQ (Solving industry’s most challenging problems using Quantum Machine Learning) has an opening for a CFD simulation engineer.
• The Technical University of Darmstadt has an open PhD position for DNS in OpenFOAM.

Just a car’s render mesh from an AirShaper blog post about race car aerodynamics.

Events

• ANSYS will be launching an “all-new” ANSYS Discovery on 29 July.
• Even though this year’s Isogeometric Analysis Conference was postponed until 2022, they are holding a Virtual IGA on 11-12 August this year and are now accepting abstracts and registrations.
• In conjunction with SC20 (and therefore still planned to be in-person) is ISAV 2020: In Situ Infrastructures for Enabling Extreme-scale Analysis and Visualization.

Real and Abstract Grids

Did you know NASA had a Photographer of the Year competition? Neither did I. But winners in the categories Places, People, Portrait, and Documentation have been announced and shared on PetaPixel. Shown here is the Places winner, a photo of the SSDI facility by Chris Gunn. [I googled for “NASA SSDI” and came up with zilch. Anyone know?]

Update: At least four alert readers [more alert than I] have demonstrated how poor my internet search skills are. the SSDI is the Spacecraft Systems Development and Integration Facility at Goddard. What we’re looking at is kinda like a huge wall of hepa filters.

Photo by Chris Gunn. From petapixel.com. See links above.

Why I chose Gunn’s winning photo of the four is probably obvious. But there’s a non-obvious reason that involves a work from the National Gallery of Art in DC that I’ve shared here before. And that’s Byron Kim’s Synecdoche.

What should one infer from the fact that a photo of a NASA technical facility and a piece of fine art share common visual attributes and are both recognition worthy? One is an abstraction and one is real. But which is which?

Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 1993. source