This week’s CFD news has something for fans of origin stories; read about how CFD Support came to be. There’s also a lot of good reading about HPC, some positive business news, and signs that we might start having in-person conferences in the not too distant future. Shown here is a reminder that Milton Van Dyke’s classic book An Album of Fluid Motion is now freely available online as a PDF. Click through for the link.

Pointwise & More

• ICYMI, a recording of the Pointwise webinar with Flexcompute on high-fidelity CFD in minutes is now available for on-demand viewing.
• And all the videos from the Five Days of Pointwise which demonstrate the new capabilities in Pointwise V18.4 are available for viewing.
• There’s now a native interface from Pointwise to AzoreCFD.
• ScienceDirect has published a special edition of select papers from the 2018 International Meshing Roundtable and they’re available now in the clear for a limited time.
• Thank you to alert reader Claudio for finding and helping translate this announcement of the release of Pointwise V18.4 written in Spanish.
• This is worth your time to read. Lubos Pirkl shares the story of how his company, CFD Support, came to be.
  • In his story, Lubos shares that “standard OpenFOAM showed itself to be absolutely incapable of delivering what was expected – a workflow to compete with professional commercial codes.” Read the article for the details of what he was saying but to me it goes back to the old adage that a program is not a product.

Cars, Boats, and Planes

• I’ve made it clear that I know nothing about cars but this article about aero mapping a Formula Student car during cornering using Fluent seems pretty interesting.
• I’m also not a huge fan of boats [actually boats are OK, it’s the deep water around them that’s scary] but the use of CFD for racing yachts is really cool as discussed in this article about INEOS Team UK.
• I am a huge fan of aircraft, so here’s a reminder that the Formula Air Grand Prix is out there trying to get started. No sign of when their first race might be. But I pray that it will fill the void I feel from the loss of the Red Bull Air Races.

Computing & Viz

• Nimbix provides this brief overview of adapting software to HPC platforms including CFD software from ANSYS and Siemens. [Of course, those two companies aren’t the only ones accelerating CFD on HPC platforms.]
• “Has IBM backed away from HPC systems?” asks HPCwire.
• What if instead of all this heavy lifting with HPC we can rely on neural networks for our fluid simulations? Watch this video interview from AirShaper for the story.
• Scientific Computing World’s HPC 2020-2021 edition is available online for your leisure reading.
• Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for July 2020.
• Spend a couple minutes with this peppy video in which Simscale answers what we can expect from the future of CFD.

Business

• Dassault Systemes reported revenue for the quarter ending 30 Sep down 3.7% relative to the same quarter last year but profit was up to €91 million.
• Tech Soft 3D announced the acquisition of…
  • Ceetron for visualization.
  • Visual Kinematics for CAE technology.
• I wait [somewhat] patiently to learn what the International Society of CFD is about. (Website is “under construction.”)
• ANSYS is acquiring Analytical Graphics for what looks to be 10x revenue according to CAE maven Monica Schnitger.
• Texas A&M was awarded a contract valued at $20 million per year (1 year minimum, 5 years maximum) to manage a University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics.

Software

• Autodesk Moldflow 2021 is now available.
• ProLB v2.6.2 was released.

Events and Jobs

• The University of Tennessee, Knoxville seeks two PhD graduate research assistants to perform research on hypersonic propulsion including CFD.
• The 36th International CAE Conference and Exhibition (a virtual event) is coming up on 30 Nov – 04 Dec.
• The 3D Collaboration and Interoperability Congress (3DCIC) won’t be held in 2021 and will resume in February 2022.
• Rivian Automotive has an opening for a thermal analysis engineer.
• Just a reminder that coming up at next summer’s AIAA Aviation (hopefully in person) are two CFD workshops that will be run in a closely integrated fashion.
  • 4th AIAA CFD High Lift Prediction Workshop
  • 3rd AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop
• The International Conference on Geometric Modeling and Processing will be held 10-13 May 2021 in Pilsen in the Czech Republic. Abstracts are due by 16 December.

CFD for…

• truck aerodynamics.
• all sorts of stuff. (Best papers and posters from the COMSOL Conference Europe 2020)
• naval architecture.
• air pollution (minimizing it, not creating it). From our friends at AzoreCFD.
• wastewater. [In the Philippines, only 10% of wastewater is treated. Eww.]
• water resources engineering. (The American Society of Civil Engineers seeks papers for a special edition of the Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering, CFD Applications in Water Resources Engineering.)

Some Things Related to OpenFOAM

• A reminder that the OpenFOAM Journal has launched. (Registration required.) From their website:
  • “The OpenFOAM® Journal aims at publishing works related to the OpenFOAM® computational library, with focus on the benefit for the OpenFOAM® community, is free to publish and open-access. Each publication has an associated discussion forum, to increase the interaction between the readers and the authors, and the overall impact of the contributions. Moreover, authors will be encouraged to provide supplementary information that will allow the reproducibility of the published information.”
  • See a video explainer here.
• From the “New to Me” department comes NablaFlow, provider of cloud-based, HPC-enabled CFD simulations. Their NablaCore solver is based on OpenFOAM. They offer a specific version, ArchiWind, for simulation of flow around buildings for pedestrian comfort.
• I’m not an OpenFOAM user nor am I taking sides but someone penned what’s basically an editorial on LinkedIn about how open is open source? I would be very much interested in your opinions if you’d share them in the comments.

Simplifying the Complex

I was browsing the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s website thinking about when I might be able to go visit the new wing they just opened. When flipping through the collection I came to an immediate halt upon seeing Madeline O’Connor’s Shrike.

Shrike is a great example of reducing a work to its simplest form without losing any of the complexity. The gallery wall is activated as part of the work from the shadows cast by the triangular forms (or are they squares piercing the wall?). There’s a visual rhythm induced by the repetition. And what’s with the black one? I’d love to see this in person.

A little Googling reminded me of a previous encounter with O’Connor’s work at the McNay in San Antonio. Check out Cross/Plus.

And yes, Shrike looks like a bunch of mesh triangles and Cross/Plus looks like a rendering of a cross field.

Bonus: Everyone interested in fluid flows should immediately download the PDF of Milton Van Dyke’s wonderful book, An Album of Fluid Motion. Parabolic Press asks that in exchange for getting this book for free you make a donation to the Sierra Club. I am particularly attracted to the images supersonic flows, probably because of my early internship at NASA Lewis’ (now Glenn) 10×10 supersonic wind tunnel which can achieve speeds up to Mach 3.5.