This week’s compilation of CFD news begins with a must-read article on how to choose colors properly when visualizing data. AI comes up twice this week as does Fortran which makes one wonder whether anyone’s programming AI in Fortran. There’s a hybrid event coming this November which is a great sign that we’ll get back to in-person conferences soon. If you’re a student seeking a scholarship to attend AIAA Aviation this August (online), their Diversity Scholars Program is accepting applications until the end of May. Of course there’s the whole suite of CFD applications for planes, trains, and automobiles. Shown here is a classic structured grid generated using Pointwise’s predecessor for an F-16.

Reading

• MUST READ: 4-part series on the color scales to use when visualizing data, something we CFDers do all the time. [Just say “No” to sickly green flowfield images.]
• And while we’re on the topic of visualizations, here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for December 2020.
• Remember a while back when the Journal of Fluid Mechanics announced a Fluids Writing Competition? Here’s one of the winning entries on the use of AI to optimize the control of fluid jets.
• Resolved Analytics profiles James Dyson‘s empire and the role of fluid dynamics in building his wealth.
• Fortran is cool again.

Events

• The SU2 Conference 2021 will be a virtual event held on 12-14 July.
• The 37th International CAE Conference will be a hybrid event held on 17-19 November 2021 in Vicenza.

CFD for

• hydrofoil-assisted aluminum catamaran tour boat for use in Alaska.
• motorcycle helmets for MotoGP.
• wastewater management. [In which we read that high-income countries treat 70% of their wastewater while low-income countries treat only 8%. Ewww.]
• a student-designed aero package for a race car.
• biomass plant operations and maintenance.
• air circulation in a passenger aircraft.
• the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.
• Finn dinghies.
• setting a record time for the Plymouth to La Rochelle run in a Maserati trimaran.
• jet engine nacelles.
• charging your electric vehicle’s batteries.
• dirty cars.

Software

• nTopology 3.0 was released with GPU accelerated visualization said to provide a 10-100x performance increase.
• ENGYS announced the release of ELEMENTS 3.3.1, a vehicle design software suite based on open source.
• ENGYS also released HELYX v3.3.1.
• ESSS and ANSYS are collaborating on a workflow for DEM simulations and have named this workflow Rocky.
• byteLAKE’s AI-accelerated CFD is said to produce results an order of magnitude faster than traditional methods at 93+% of the accuracy.
• TransMagic R12 sp3 was released.
• NUMECA released v16.1 of FINE/Turbo, FINE/Agile, and FINE/Design3D.

From Pointwise

• Pointwise was recently acquired by Cadence Design Systems, the same company that recently acquired NUMECA. Read the details here.
• We are actively seeking an Applications Engineer and a Software Engineer.
• Have you had a chance to download and read our white paper on Geometry Modeling for Mesh Generation and CFD? (Registration required.)
• Read about mesh adaptation work for a turbomachinery case.
• See how Pointwise as a platform enables the automation of meshing.

News

• AIAA’s Diversity Scholars Program seeks applicants for a scholarship to attend the AVIATION Forum coming up in August 2021. Deadline to apply is 31 May.
• Siemens Digital Industries seeks to hire an Advanced Mesh Generation Software Engineer for their Austin, TX location.
• The Univ. of Edinburgh’s Vortex Interaction Lab seeks to hire a research associate in computational fluid mechanics.
• The OpenFOAM Journal continues to seek articles for their first issue and have chosen a cover image showing the evolution of eddy detachment results over a 20-year timeframe.
• Friendship Systems announced the winner of the CAESES Student Award.
• The website openfoam.com has been updated. Check it out.

Intense Concentration, Confident Reserve

Audrey Stone cites Vija Celmins, Agnes Martin, and Mark Rothko as some of her influences. You might not get all of that from the work I’ve chosen to include here. But like Celmins and Martin, there is a patience and deliberation in this work of thread, ink, and pencil as she explores what defines a line. Read more at the artist’s website.

Bonus: A candidate for the presidency of Nigeria is a mechanical engineer with an undergraduate specialization in CFD. Vote wisely.

Thank you to everyone who called or emailed to ask whether This Week in CFD and Another Fine Mesh will continue in the wake of Pointwise’s acquisition by Cadence. We appreciate your readership.