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.

Biz

• Altair acquired M-Base Engineering for their materials (especially plastic) database.
• Tech Soft 3D acquired Visual Kinematics.
• For more on VKI, visit their website.
• As you know, I’m reluctant to share “market research reports” because most of them that pass through my inbox give me the willies. But this one came to me from what I consider to be a reliable source. So here goes: the simulation software market is forecast to grow (CAGR) at 16.89% from now until 2025. [Not 16.8%, not 17%, not 16.88% but 16.89%.]

Events

• Just a reminder that at January’s AIAA SciTech Forum (an online event), there will be a special session on Defining Grand Challenge Problems for the CFD 2030 Vision. This session consists of two parts: a technical session with three papers on grand challenges for external aero, propulsion, and space access and a panel discussion on how we can bring these to fruition.
  • These technical presentations will go into detail on the ideas discussed at the AIAA Aviation Forum 2020: Aerospace Grand Challenge Problems for Revolutionary CFD Capabilities. This link will take you to a video of the discussion and the presentation PDFs.
• Some presentations (videos) from last month’s VMAP International Conference on CAE Interoperability 2020 are now available online. VMAP is “a vendor-neutral standard for CAE data storage to enhance interoperability in virtual engineering workflows.”
• The Thermoanalytics 2021 User Group Meeting has been scheduled for 2-4 November in Munich.

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.

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.”]

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

• I think I missed this announcement earlier in the year, but CFturbo 2021 R1 has been available for a while with a ton of new features for turbomachinery design and automation.
• If you can make sense out of this [IMO] poorly written and organized announcement let me know. It teases that something valuable is buried within. 19 Proposals Selected To Develop A World-Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe.
• Hexagon/MSC/Cradle offer a white paper on their CFD titled Turbocharging CFD with Katana, making an analogy with the samurai sword. [At least they’re not using that threadbare “Swiss Army knife” analogy.]
• TAITherm [which I recently discovered is pronounced tie-therm – yes, I thought it was T-A-I-therm, sue me] and CoTherm 2020.2 have been released.
• Open CASCADE Technology 7.5.0 is now available.

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.

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