This week’s This Week in CFD is 2020’s last hurrah and while we tried to include everything, we ran out of time. LOTS of event news as though people are anxious to begin meeting in-person. (Let’s face it – online conferences are awful. Folks are doing the best they can under the circumstances but it ain’t the same.) Lots of new software news as well, as though everyone was trying to clear the decks before year’s end. And the image of the week – well, it demonstrates that the real world can be as abstract as any painting. Shown here is a wind turbine flowfield from Tecplot 360 2020 R2.

News

• “What’s the sound of a perfect fluid?” is not a Zen question like “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” [It also probably isn’t what you think it is.]
• Pointwise will be filling three open positions soon.
  • Applications Engineer on our Engineering Services team.
  • Engineering Intern on our Engineering Services team.
  • Engineering Intern on our Product Development team.
• In the article Changing CFD, Scientific Computing World cites recent CFD advances at Altair, COMSOL, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and byteLake.
• Congrats on the new consultancy, Astrid Walle CFDsolutions.
• How snakes fly. [Isn’t the real question “Why do snakes fly?”]

Events

• At next June’s AIAA Aviation Forum, two CFD workshops will be held collaboratively to continue the ongoing assessment of the state of the art. GMGW-3 and HiLiftPW-4 will be integrated through the use of Technology Focus Groups that will explore one particular topic such as geometry prep, mesh adaptation, RAN/LES, and more. Read all the details at each workshop’s website.
  • 3rd AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop
  • 4th AIAA CFD High Lift Prediction Workshop
• There’s something for everyone in the Gallery of Fluid Motion from last month’s virtual APS DFD meeting. [My favorite is the pulsating, Mach 6 shock waves. What’s yours?]
• At January’s AIAA SciTech Forum, Pointwise will be presenting the results of collaborative work with NASA Langley on A Framework for Mesh-Geometry Associativity during Mesh Adaptation.
• While we wait for their website to come online, don’t forget that next summer’s virtual International Meshing Roundtable will be held the week of 21 June. Full papers are due 19 February. There will be no registration fee for this event.
• Upstream CFD will host the 2nd Automotive CFD Prediction Workshop (AutoCFD 2) in Berlin on 26-27 August 2021.
• The call for papers for next year’s NAFEMS World Congress (25-29 October, Salzburg) is open with a due date of 16 April.
• Looking way ahead, the Symposium on Turbulence Modeling: Roadblocks and the Potential for Machine Learning will be held on 23-25 March 2022. Your 1-page abstract will be due in October 2021.
• Phoenix Integration’s 2021 International Users’ Conference has been rescheduled for 18-20 May in Annapolis.
• Abstracts are now being accepted for AIAA Propulsion & Energy 2021 and are due 11 February 2021 for the event to be held 9-11 August in Denver.
• The 2nd preCICE Workshop 2021 will be held online on 22-25 February. Abstracts are due by 07 January.

Business & Award & Application

• Autodesk’s Q3 revenue was up 4.3% ($952 million) relative to the previous calendar quarter. Profit is up as well. The growth is credited to their cloud-based platform and subscription business model.
• Kitware is now 100% employee owned.
• Congratulations to the Aircraft Fuel Tank Component Design team at the University of Cape Town for being awarded a silver medal from the Royal Aeronautical society for their CFD work.
• Comparing different CFD software (OpenFOAM, FloEDF, and ANSYS CFX) with NACA 2412 airfoil. [From of all publications, Progress in Agricultural Engineering Sciences.]

Software

• Numeca released FINE/Open 10.1.
• FLIP Fluids v1.0.9 is now available (a fluids simulation plug-in for Blender).
• CFturbo 2020 R2 was released for turbomachinery design.
• Tecplot RS 2020 R1, for visualization and knowledge extraction of oil and gas reservoir simulations, was released. Watch this video about the software’s new key frame animation.
• Autodesk CFD 2021 is now available.
• What’s new in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation 2021.

More Software

• Tecplot 360 2020 R2 was released.
• ESTECO released modeFRONTIER Release 2020 | Winter.
• CCE will soon launch Ensuite-Cloud Revue for CAD collaboration.
• FieldView 20 is now available for CFD postprocessing and boasts vast performance and ease of use improvements. (More here.) Also, their website www.fieldviewcfd.com has been updated.
• Flow Science launched FLOW-3D Hydro for civil and environmental engineering applications of CFD.

More News

• Neural Concept Shape can “drastically reduces 3D simulation time to below one second.”
• SimScale has an opening for a Senior CFD Software Developer.
• The title of this article from topspeed.com made me LOL: Aerodynamics – it’s more than just a fancy word.
• Congratulations to our friends at ANSYS for being designated by Fortune as #41 in their Future 50 list.
• The U.S. Dept. of Energy has $32 million to spend “to harness DOE supercomputers for advanced research in a wide range of scientific fields.”
• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for September 2020.

CFD for…

• marine stabilizers.
• modular causeway systems.
• the Raspberry Pi case fan.
• drone noise.
• fancy Aston Martins.
• LNG flow during bunkering.
• luge sleds.
• bicycle wheels.
• pickup truck hardtops.
• trucks and planes (the PRACE SHAPE project).
• truss-braced wings (rare sighting of CFD in Aviation Week)
• active flow control.

Starry Night

Mondrian’s Composition in Black and Gray holds a special place in my heart. In Mondrian’s own words, the painting achieves an abstract Christmas mood through a predominance of the spiritual. I’ll just leave it at that.

P.S. This will be the final edition of This Week in CFD for 2020 because the next two Fridays are Christmas and New Year’s Day and even I don’t work on those days. (In my head I heard my lovely wife laughing at me as I typed that.) Thank you for your readership this past year. As 2020 and all its closings come to an end, let’s make 2021 about openings and new beginnings.