This week’s CFD news includes many examples of CFD in action from baseballs to cement and canoes. We start off with CFD expert Doug Ball being interviewed about HPC which really is a must-read. And if you like reading, the proceedings of the PyFR Symposium are now online for your enjoyment.  Shown here is a CFD solution from the announcement of RhinoCFD v2.1.

News

• CFDer (and that moniker is quite an understatement) Doug Ball was interviewed about HPC and CFD and observes “in the area of CFD, where we have really plateaued because of the physical models, we’re going to have to wait for some other quantum leap before we can bring in direct numeric simulation and that kind of thing, where the models are enormous compared to even today’s really big ones.”
• Proceedings of last month’s PyFR Symposium are now available online.
  • I will point your attention to the presentation detailing our latest work on high-order, curve meshing presented by Dr. John Stone, our representative in the UK.
  • Also, Zenotech wrote about their work in aeroacoustics.
• The CONVERGE User Conference will now be held online on 28 Sep – 02 Oct.

CFD for…

• 3D printing, or more precisely ‘‘Using chaotic advection for facile high-throughput fabrication of ordered multilayer micro- and nanostructures: continuous chaotic printing.”
• superchargers. [Apparently a thing that goes under the hood of an automobile.]
• baseballs.
• electric ferries. [Which would be a great name for a rock band.]
• cement.
• canoeing.
• a solar yacht.
• rudders.
• Pokemon (see image below).

I advise the reader to approach this author’s conclusion with skepticism. See link above.

Reading and Writing

• “Why is meshing important?” asks SimuTech. “The mesh influences the accuracy, convergence, and speed of the simulation.”
• In Best Practices for Running CFD Workloads on AWS we read “computational accuracy is dependent on the size, cell  location, and skewness of the [mesh] cells.”
• After I shared the article about writing abstracts for technical papers, alert reader Mike pointed me at Jonathan Shewchuk’s Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math.

Software

• RhinoCFD v2.1 was released.
• Pointwise V18.3 R2 was released.
• Numeca is offering their CFD software via a green cloud.
• Kitware launched F3D, a minimalist viewer for VTK, STL, PLY, OBJ and other formats.

Navigating a Mesh

“We kinda have a feeling we’ve seen this stuff before,” is what painter Jason Rohlf imagines engineers think when viewing his work. He has lifted certain visual elements from maps or computer imagery and used them simply for their aesthetics.

Certainly his painting Outward (shown below) gives meshers a bit of deja vu.

Jason Rohlf, Outward. Image from toryfolliard.com. See links above.

I saw Rohlf’s work first on Hyperallergic in a 2013 write-up of an exhibition of works exploring the concept of networks. When I dug a bit further into his paintings at the Tory Folliard Gallery, I came across mesh schematics that I swear I’ve drawn myself such as Good Fortune 3 (shown below).

Jason Rohlf, Good Fortune 3.