This Week in CFD

In this week’s CFD news we learn that in-person events are starting to show up on the calendar. Lots of applied CFD this week, from boilers to bookshelves. And news of a new book by Edward Tufte for those of us who create visual presentations of data (which is virtually everyone doing CFD). To celebrate the fact that it’s Masters week in the golf world, you see here some work by Airshaper on the aerodynamics of the Volkswagen Golf.

From Meshing World HQ

  • ICYMI, this week has been Five Days of Pointwise. On Monday through Thursday we dropped [as the kids say] a new video illustrating the new capabilities available in Pointwise V18.4 beginning with intelligent, automated surface meshing, the first in a series of features to be known as Flashpoint. Today’s fifth event was a live webinar Q&A session with three of our team leaders on the product.
  • Join us on 17 November for a live webinar with our friends at Flexcompute as we should how to Mesh and Run a High-Fidelity Aircraft Simulation in Minutes. Registration is required.
  • Azore Software announced the availability of a native interface between Pointwise and their AzoreCFD flow solver.
Register for a live webinar on 17 Nov with Pointwise and Flexcompute that will show how to use Pointwise’s Flashpoint intelligent, automatic surface meshing and other tools with Flexcompute’s Flow360 solver to get high-fidelity results in minutes.

Biz

STAR-CCM+ simulation of the thermal comfort in a bus. Image from siemens.com. [That’s thermal comfort but what about other levels of comfort on a bus like the sticky seats?]

Events

Second time, with confidence. Take 26 minutes to enjoy this video presentation of An Overview of HPC and CFD at NASA.

Misc.

  • How important is a proper mesh? According to Steen Solutions, “Proper meshing allows for accurate analysis, regardless of whether the process is automated or manual. For any product development project to be successful, analysis is critical, and proper meshing is an important part of that analysis.” [I prefer to think in terms of suitability. It’s good that a synonym for proper is suitable.]
  • OK, OpenFOAMers, run the backward facing step and submit it for the Community Christmas Competition by 24 November. Details are [only?] in this video.
  • [Fanboy warning.] Edward Tufte has published a new book, Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth. Since Tufte published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information all those years ago, I have been a fan. [Note that being a adherent is a lot more difficult than being a fan.] The visual presentation of CFD data is such an integral part of what we do every day I highly recommend that you look into any or all of Tufte’s books.
Always a sucker for a cool mesh image. Here’s one from Siemens’ 5 Steps to Prepare CAD for CFD Simulation. Image from siemens.com.

CFD for…

  • power boilers.
  • electric motorcycles.
  • wind power.
  • improving the aerodynamics of the Volkswagen Golf. [Lemme guess, they just didn’t put dimples all over it. Sorry for the golf joke. It is Masters week though. But wait – they kinda did.]
  • bookshelf speakers. [I used to be somewhat of an audiophile. But someone’s going to have to explain this to me: “KEF’s Uni-Q driver array plus Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) port tech equals high resolution and big sound.”]
Horizontal axis wind turbine rotor simulation computed with ExaWind. Image from cleantechnica.com. See “wind power” link above.

Programming

  • “Fortran has ruled scientific computing, but Julia emerged for large-scale numerical work.”
  • C++ programming language: How it became the invisible foundation for everything, and what’s next”

Software

Flow through the T161 cascade, part of a project (HIFI-TURB) that involves using ML and AI to improve turbulence modeling. Image from numeca.com.

The Grid Obscures and Reveals

One way artists use the grid is to impose structure and order to the canvas as a guide or aid to the application of pigment and form. McArthur Binion uses the grid to impose rational order to his personal history. On closer inspection, what appears at first to be geometric abstraction is revealed to be hand drawn lines and forms over bits of his own life such as his birth certificate or a photograph of his mother. While the grid may first seem to be a concealer, it is the visual form that draws you in to the painting’s depth and reveals what’s truly important.

As first seen in Art News.

McArthur Binion, Modern:Ancient:Brown(violet), 2020. Image from artnews.com. See link above.

Bonus: NASA’s films of Apollo moon missions have been remastered and the results almost look like HD.

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