This Week in CFD

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

This is an extremely coarse mesh (5.6 million linear tets) for the NASA HL-CRM geometry model that has been curved and elevated to high-order for next summer’s High Lift Prediction Workshop. Mesh from Pointwise. See links below. [While linear meshes keep getting bigger and bigger, a high-order mesh needs to get smaller and smaller in terms of cell count. Somewhat paradoxically, generating a coarse mesh on a complex geometry model can be much more difficult than creating a fine one.]

Events

A new Pointwise case study describes joint work with ISimQ on providing mesh adaptation, in the volume mesh and on surface meshes including those constrained to the geometry model, as a framework that can be used with virtually any CFD solver. Shown here is the hub of the Aachen Rotor where the mesh has been adapted to an ANSYS CFX flow solution.

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.]
This IMAGE OF THE WEEK comes from FYFD. It’s Lake Kivu in Africa – 450 meters deep and the layers never mix.

Software

Thanks to alert reader David for sharing this photograph of mesh art spotted in our nation’s capital.

More Software

I’m a sucker for a mesh pic, even when I’m late sharing it. This turkey mesh was generated using ANSYS and cooked in an interesting way (the turkey, not the mesh).

More News

Thanks to alert reader Eric, we have this fascinating look at wooden pixels. Given a photograph and a limited selection of pieces of wood, how can you cut “pixels” out of the wood for the best approximation of the photo?

CFD for…

There usually aren’t any images in “CFD for…” articles so whenever I find one I’ll usually share it. This is a marine stabilizer. See link above. Image from maritime-executive.com.

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.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Black and Gray, 1919. source

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.

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2 Responses to This Week in CFD

  1. Astrid Walle says:

    Thanks so much for mentioning my new business! Such an honour 🙏

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