Welcome to the special Black Friday edition of This Week in CFD where all this curated fluid dynamics and engineering simulation goodness is available today for 100% off regular price with discount code CFD100. Everyone else pays full price for news about a 64-core CPU, hardware disaggregation, lots of 2021 events, and an update on the financial health of the CAE market. Plus all the usual stuff, of course. Shown here is a simulation performed at U. of Michigan of the plume from a Mars lander’s thruster interacting with the planet’s surface.

Software

• Rhoxyz Version 2020.3 was released with a new GUI and CLI and updates to the core solver.
• Simcenter STAR-CCM+ 2020.3 was released with many new features including a scale-resolving hybrid turbulence model for unsteady RANS.
• SimScale launched a beta version of their new CFD postprocessor.
• Pointwise V18.4, including Flashpoint – intelligent, automatic surface meshing – was recently released. Watch the webinar here.
  • Thanks to Digital Engineering’s “Editor’s Pick” designation.
• OnScale released OnScale Solve, “the world’s first cloud engineering simulation platform.” You can get a free, private account with 500 hours of simulation time.
• FLOW-3D Hydro, the water-focused CFD software for civil and environmental engineering applications, has a new user interface and workflow.
• Introducing Flowfusic, “OpenFOAM in a cloud from your web browser.”
• Deep learning for solving PDEs like the N-S equations.

Hardware

• I don’t know enough about computer hardware to fully grok this article, but it introduces a relatively new vendor (Liqid) and something called disaggregation which seems to allow an HPC system’s resources to be reconfigured as a job’s needs dictate. [I welcome corrections to my interpretation.]
• AMD introduced the first 64-core workstation CPU, the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX.
• ANSYS Cloud and Microsoft Azure are now integrated.

Jobs

• Pointwise has three job openings in Fort Worth, Texas.
  • Applications Engineer, Engineering Services
  • Summer 2021 Intern, Engineering Services
  • Summer 2021 Intern, Product Development
• Tech Soft 3D seeks a Product Owner in the US and Europe.
• The University of Edinburgh has a funded PhD project for someone to improve the meshing performance for race car geometry models.

Events

• At AIAA SciTech 2021 (an online event) the CFD 2030 Integration Committee invites you to attend two sessions devoted to grand challenge problems for CFD.
  • A special session with three invited papers on grand challenge problems for external aerodynamics, propulsion, and space access.
  • A special panel sessions with an additional three invited panelists to discuss how to bring these grand challenge ideas to fruition.
• At AIAA Aviation 2021 [hopefully an in-person event?] two CFD workshops will be offered in a highly integrated format.
  • The 3rd AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop
  • The 4th AIAA CFD High Lift Prediction Workshop
• A recording (registration required) of a panel discussion on 3D CAD interoperability is available from the 3D Collaboration and Interoperability Congress.
  • Our friends at Action Engineering who run the 3DCIC have released OSCAR, the Ontology System for CAd Reuse.
• Recordings from the Altair Technology Conference are available for you to watch for free.
• At AIAA Aviation 2021, a new CFD workshop will debut.
  • The 1st AIAA Ice Prediction Workshop
• Mentor’s User2User online event is coming to Europe on 01 December. The North American event was 10 November and can now be streamed.

Biz

• ESI’s Q3 revenue was down 12% including license revenue down 8%. As noted by Monica Schnitger, “everyone is finding new business incredibly hard to close right now.”
• PTC’s Q4 revenue and profit were both up, $391 million and $53 million, respectively.
• STAR-CCM+ is getting some computational chemistry through Siemens’ acquisition of Culgi.
  • Read more about this deal from one of my go-to sources for CAE industry insight, Monica Schnitger.
• ANSYS’ Q3 revenue decreased 5% yet they still kept about $75 million to the bottom line.
• OpenFOAM’s funding campaign for 2021 is underway. They want organizations using the software to purchase a maintenance plan.

Viz

• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for August 2020.
• The webinar featuring Pointwise Flashpoint for automatic surface meshing and Flexcompute’s Flow360 for fast CFD is now available for on-demand viewing. [Not really Viz but I am running a heading imbalance right now.]

CFD for…

• floating solar energy collection platforms. [What’s cool here (pardon the pun) is that the water on which the array floats also cools it and thereby increases its efficiency.]
• Formula-1.
• detecting COVID-19.
• simulating plume-surface interaction for Mars landers. [Thanks FYFD for the tip.]
• dropping bunnies and ducks into a bowl. [OK, it’s not CFD but high-order elements for animation with embedded simulation. Watch the video.]
• half a superbike. [?]
• wastewater management.
• Indy cars.
• VTOL business jets.

Guessing Pays Off

Thanks go to my favorite digital artist specializing in triangles, Andy Walker. These are the prizes for coming in second place in his recent contest to guess the number of triangles that would be used in one of his works. I can only imagine what the first place prize was.

I wonder what I’m going to do with all this stuff?

If you’d like to get in on the action, his current contest is to guess how many unique colors he’ll use in a new work, Westonbirt Arboretum II (see below). Probably at least a dozen. Just email your guess to info@andywalkerartist.com.

Bonus: Physics explains why (American) football passes spiral. (Spoiler: “the gyroscopic precession driven by the torque that results from the ball’s nonzero angle of attack and by the interaction of that torque with the ball’s angular momentum.”)

Double Bonus: Alert reader Matt found this video about non-repeating patterns that are a geometer’s dream.