This week’s CFD news includes a “must read” and my “image of the week” both from Aerospace America magazine. From the financial pages comes news of Cadence’s acquisition of Numeca, noted by CAE maven Monica Schnitger as continuing the trend of consolidation. There are some great CFD applications including the results of ANSYS’ Art of Simulation contest. Shown here is a CFD simulation of NASA’s X-57 “Maxwell” electric aircraft. That’s two e-craft this week.

News

• Progress Toward the 2030 Vision of CFD is the AIAA’s CFD 2030 Integration Committee’s annual contribution to Aerospace America’s Year in Review Issue. [I’m still waiting on my print version to land in my mailbox but that’s not relevant here.] See image of the week below.
• READ THIS: Why We’re Not There Yet on CFD by [my friend] Steve Legensky, founder and CTO of Intelligent Light.
• What was perhaps the most surprising [to me] news of the week was Cadence’s acquisition of Numeca. Surprising because Cadence is an EDA company. But on reflection it makes sense; cooling of electronics and their packaging is becoming more important. And statements in the announcement indicate that Cadence is broadening their “system analysis” capabilities to multi-disciplinary and optimization. [Everyone says “multidisciplinary” when they buy a CFD company.] Purchase price was not included in the announcement.
  • Cadence’s blog post about the acquisition.
  • Numeca’s announcement. (In which we read that CFD is a $1.6 billion market.) [And in which I learned that the acronym TAM = total addressable market.]
  • And Monica Schnitger’s take on the deal. (It’s “something to watch.”)
• NVIDIA now has a storefront on AWS.

Jobs

• Lilium, designers and builders of an electric aircraft for “regional mobility,” has an opening for an aerodynamics software developer “to work with us on our innovative in-house Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code. This code utilizes state-of-the-art High Performance Computing (HPC) hardware and software libraries to target special purpose simulations which are not feasible with commercial solutions and to achieve an unprecedented performance for short turnaround times.”
• Pointwise, that’s us, has an opening for an Applications Engineer on our Engineering Services (formerly Technical Support) team who’ll generate meshes and help others do the same.
• Pointwise, that’s us again, has two openings for interns this summer.
  • Engineering Services
  • Product Development
• While it’s not surprising that a company that makes remote access software published a report indicating that remote work is here to stay, I am interested in the opinions of CFD folks on the whole premise as outlined in Digital Engineering’s Remote Work Is Here to Stay.
• On the topic of working from home, the WSJ asks whether a home office is actually more productive.
• ICYMI, Alan Klug is Tecplot’s new President as Tom Chan moves to the CEO role.
• CCTech has an opening for an OpenFOAM solver developer.

Fluids and Software

• Here’s the best of FYFD for 2020. You do follow FYFD for all your fluids goodness, right? My favorite: updating undergraduate heat transfer on the topic of boundary layer transition.
• OpenCFD released OpenFOAM v2012. [I feel I shared this before.]
• Speaking of OpenFOAM, the OpenFOAM Foundation is at least half way to their goal of soliciting funding for 2021.
• Beta CAE released v21.1.0 of their software suite.
• A paper on something called multi-agent reinforcement learning for turbulence modeling for LES.
• And computing turbulence with AI.

CFD for…

• generating aerodynamic databases using CFD for NASA’s electric aircraft.
• developing best practices for CFD simulation of NASA’s truss-braced wing aircraft.
• materials science. [Not the most clearly written article on teh interwebs.]
• winning ANSYS’ The Art of Simulation Image Contest.

Food

• Pasta won’t taste the same after considering its geometry: conchiglie rigati and cavatappi.
• Drinking bubble tea is difficult enough. Simulating it using CFD?

Grid Over Water

The art world lost painter Young-il Ahn last month. We are fortunate to be able to keep his abstract paintings.

Paradoxically, Ahn found his vision for his Water series of paintings after being lost at sea. They are everything I look for in abstraction. Complexity veiled beneath simplicity. Regular and irregular elements woven together. Fantastic use of color. And the fact that the paintings utilize a grid motif to illustrate a water (fluid) theme is just icing on the cake.

Bonus: I’m just going to put this link here and see what happens. The Biggest Lie in Open Source.