This week’s CFD news includes articles that pose questions about open source software. Does it have a people problem? And are people prejudiced against it? Proving that good things never get old, there’s a multi-part video series on fluid mechanics that’s as relevant today as it was in the 1960s. And if you’re looking for geometry models to 3D print, the new kid on the block is Thangs. The image shown here is a polariscope image of anisotropy in glass from an article about use of CFD to study the tempering of glass using ANSYS and OpenFOAM.

Jobs & More

• Cranfield University has an opening for a PhD studentship in the area of high-speed intake aerodynamics.
  • This takes me back to the summer of 1983 when my first engineering job involved work on NASA’s variable diameter centerbody (VDC) supersonic inlet.
• Interested students should apply for a mentorship from OpenHPC with applications due by 07 Sep 2020.
• This announcement is from Dec 2019 but it seems you can do quantum computing through AWS.
• Autodesk has a good Q2 with overall revenue and “design” revenue both up 15% to $913 million and $821 million, respectively.

Software

• Coreform, developers of “spline-based finite element software” (isogeometric analysis?), earned the 594th spot on Inc’s list of the 5,000 fastest growing companies.
• PyWake is an open-source, wind farm simulation tool.
• InfoWorld says open source has a people problem. Does it? Does OpenFOAM, for example, have a people problem?
• In a LinkedIn article we read about prejudices against open-source software. Are there?

Events

• AIAA SciTech 2021 will be fully virtual.
  • At SciTech there will be a special session on formulating grand challenge problems for assessing the state-of-the-art in CFD from the areas of high-lift aerodynamics, gas turbine engines, space launch vehicles, and hypersonics. In preparation for those sessions you should watch the panel discussion on grand challenges from Aviation 2020.
  • The 1st AIAA Stability and Control Prediction Workshop will be held virtually the week after SciTech on 19-20 January.
  • The 1st AIAA Transition Modeling Workshop will be held virtually the week after SciTech on 21-22 January.
• The VINAS Online Users Conference will be 07-09 October. (Full disclosure: VINAS represents Pointwise in Japan.)
• Autodesk University 2020 for North and South America will be 17-20 November.

Reading, Listening, & Watching

• Have you been following The Mesh Up podcast? It explores “how computational fluid dynamics (CFD) affects our daily lives in seen and unseen ways,”
• I know nothing about graph theory but I’m curious whether this recent breakthrough (how to connect points in a graph with lines that don’t cross) can be applied to meshing.
• Watch the Navier-Stokes equations be derived in about 15 minutes.
• Along those same lines, here’s a 21-part video playlist of videos created in the 1960s for teaching fluid mechanics. Or skip right to the one on flow visualization.
• Here’s part 2 of a series of articles on using STEP files with SolidWorks. [Great details in here.]
• This 15-minute video is a good overview of the history of Parasolid.

CFD for…

• refrigerators (more specifically, dirt accumulation on condensers).
• tempered glass.
• superchargers. [I’m wondering how many readers get the Mr. Whipple reference?]

From Pointwise

• Here’s a video showing how you can use Tecplot to create a sizing field in order to generate an adapted mesh in Pointwise.
• And in this video from the SU2 Conference you’ll learn how Pointwise’s flexibility and automation features were used as part of a framework for adjoint-based optimization of boilers.
• This case study describes how the ability to generate and combine different types of meshes to accommodate complex geometry contributed to accurate CFD for rod bundles.

Geometric Space

How much of contemporary, geometric, abstract painting is influenced by the digital worlds of our computer screens? In the case of Torben Giehler, we’re seeing more AEC and GIS than discretization. He has created worlds or at least rooms that seem somewhat explorable despite being only 2D.

Maybe we should be asking how our computer screens can be influenced by abstract painting.