This Week in CFD reached convergence long before I had exhausted the two-week backlog of news. With baseball season underway here in the US, fans will enjoy the case study describing how high-fidelity CFD can predict the trajectory of various types of pitches. There’s a great “must read” article comparing work in academia with work in a national lab. And there’s a wee bit of Pointwise news had you missed it yesterday. Shown here is a generatively-design duct tongue profusion from an article about the use of of advanced CAE technology to cool inkjet print heads and other electronic components. [Duck Tongue Profusion would be a great name for a rock band.]

MoFEM has a Navier-Stokes solver.

MeshWorks is an “integrated FEA platform that includes both preprocessor and postprocessor steps” from BIAS Engineering in Istanbul.

ESI seeks to hire a CFD Support Engineer for their Munich office.

Beta CAE release v21.0.3 of their software suite.

For my baseball loving readers comes this application of CFD to the study of various pitches in which, among other things, it was discovered that “[a low-speed rotating forkball with a two-seam backspin seam] does not approach a parabolic trajectory due to the low speed rotation and weak upward lift force, but that the trajectory is lowered due to the downward force “negative Magnus effect” occurring in the seam angle range of -30 to 90 degrees. They also found that the “negative Magnus effect” does not occur with a four-seam pitch of the same velocity and rotation speed.” Seems less controversial than the new 3-batter minimum rule.

It looks like the OpenFOAM Journal is open for submissions.

And on the topic of journals, JOSS (the Journal of Open Source Software) seeks editors.

CFD Direct describes how they’re redesigning OpenFOAM for thermophysical transport models and how those changes have had benefits for a lot of the code base.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will be using software from Zapata Computing to understand how quantum computing can benefit CFD.

Take a few moments to read about one of the pioneers of CFD, David Gosman.

You have until 18 Jun 2021 to enter NASA’s “Break the Ice” challenge in which valuable prizes are available for good ideas on digging and moving moon dirt.

CFD for AEC (using SimScale).

CFD for legacy pumps.

CFD for complete pump systems.

CFD for decarbonizing shipping operations. (Many cool videos await you at this link.)

CFD for motorcycle aerodynamics.

CFD for a mighty fancy sailing yacht. [And I’ve never fancied the word “sloop” as used in this version of the same story ever since that Beach Boys song.]

You have the opportunity to benchmark SIMULIA CFD on an HPC cluster from Nor-Tech.

The OpenFOAM Technology Primer is available on GitLab. Which is somehow different than it being available on Zenodo. [I’m so confused.]

TIL about the Urban Fluid Mechanics Special Interest Group, “an open community whose interests cover a broad range of issues associated with flows in urban areas.”

It’s not too late to register for a 20 April webinar from Hexagon MSC Software during which they say see how to use “Machine Learning To Make CFD Predictions in Seconds.” Probably related to MSC’s recent acquisition of CADLM.

Red Bull Formula 1 says they’ve come to an understanding of last season’s correlation problems but honestly I don’t know what this means: “We managed to understand what our tools were telling us as well, both the wind tunnel and CFD [computational fluid dynamics], and some of the correlation issues that we had in replicating what those tools were saying and what we were seeing on-track.” Can a car person please explain?

MUST READ OF THE WEEK: Working in a National Lab vs. Academia. It’s long which means you’ll gain a lot of insight; at least I did. I also learned about being a Research Software Engineer and the existence of a professional organization for such-titled people.

ICYMI, Pointwise has been acquired by Cadence and joins a team with a deep history in systems analysis rooted in the EDA side of CAE and growing to encompass CFD including NUMECA (acquired earlier this year). Read the announcement on Cadence’s website.

With the news item above about CFD for urban architectures, it’s mere coincidence that I found Sarah Morris’ painting The Building As a Pretext [Sound Graph]. She draws inspiration from urban architecture and translates it into deceptively simple shapes that allude to the urbanscape’s connectedness and layered history. See more at the artist’s website.