
This week’s CFD news includes a nice article about gas turbine engine CFD using a GPU accelerated code (the image shown here) and a nice interview with Siemens’ CEO. There are positive signs ahead according to some financial news and events to look forward to in the coming year, especially an invited session of technical papers on grand challenge problems for the CFD Vision 2030. And we hope you’re feeling musical today.
Update: It seems I was too obscure in identifying the article to which the image above belongs. Under the Software heading, see the article about GE’s GENESIS LES code.
News
- If you’ve got 30 minutes to spare, Tony Hemmelgarn (CEO of Siemens Digital Industries Software) is interviewed on the topic of human-centered innovation.
- If you are unfamiliar with the Altair Partner Alliance and their patented license model you can get updated here.
- Monica Schnitger [her blog is worth following] summarized the PLM world’s financial performance as “it could’ve been much worse” as a lead-in to reporting on Altair’s Q2 results. Their software revenue of $81.8 million was down 3% with paid-up/perpetual licenses taking the biggest hit, down 27%. Perhaps more importantly, CEO Jim Scapa said that they’re through the worst of the COVID-19 effects.
- Manchester Metropolitan University School of Engineering has an opening for an R&D CFD Engineer.

CFD for…
- waste water management.
- bicycle wheels.
- tug boats.
- medical tubing.
- NASCAR.
- other types of racing cars.
- tractor trailer aerodynamics.
Guitars?
There are times when a theme emerges. This is one of those times.



Software
- nTopology is offering free stickers because of the lack of in-person conferences this year at which they had planned to give them away. [I am especially interested in the “Employees Must Clean Meshes Before Returning to Work” sticker and I’d need a lot of them. HINT HINT to any alert nTopology readers.]
- Tecplot shares information about visualization isosurfaces within higher-order elements.
- Very nice article about use of the GENESIS LES code on Oak Ridge’s supercomputers.
- PTC has made the Onshape Education Suite Enterprise plan freely available for this school year with registration open through 20 November.
- Learn mesh generation with Pointwise anytime, anywhere with our recently released Pointwise Mesh Generation Foundations online course.

Events
- For fans of Pointwise in Japan, the VINAS Online Users Conference 2020 will be held on 07-09 October.
- The Aachen Colloquium Digital Mobility will be an online event this year on 05-07 October.
- The 3DExperience Modeling & Simulation Virtual Conference will be held 21-22 October.
- Following on the heels of this summer’s panel discussion on grand challenge problems in support of the CFD Vision 2030, the AIAA’s CFD 2030 Integration Committee will be hosting a special session at SciTech 2021 on Defining Grand Challenge Problems for the CFD 2030 Vision. Four invited speakers will address grand challenges from the perspectives of high-lift aero, jet propulsion, space flight, and hypersonics.
Cellular Mesh
I like discovering new (to me) artists like Hsiao Chin. The man is in his eighties and has lived and worked all over the world. After his stint the USofA he said “It isn’t easy to live in a country where everyone has to pretend to be happy, young, and beautiful.” That observation aside, his work certainly bridges eastern and western abstraction.
Many modern uses of the grid in painting are a reflection on the digitization or computerization of our time. In Chin’s Samadhi 34 shown below, the effect is more cellular and organic. (Yes, I may be over-interpreting the green as a leaf.) Overall, the balance of the forms is impeccable, from the upward thrusting red and the green recoiling from it to the bare canvas all the way up the left side.
Originally discovered on Artsy.

Bonus: Digital artist Andy Walker whom I’ve mentioned here before is running a contest with prizes based on who guesses closest to the actual number of triangles in his next painting.