This week’s CFD news includes both an image of the week and an application of the week – draw your own conclusions. We’re still seeing a lot of online events but I am happy that AIAA SciTech 2022 looks to be an online and in-person event. See you in San Diego. Lots of financial results, lots of meshing jobs. Plus the triumvirate of AI, GPU, and quantum computing. Shown here is a classic application of CFD to wind turbine siting. This is a plot of turbulence intensity over terrain and you can read more about the application here.

Events

• CadenceLIVE Americas, a digital event, is coming up soon on 8-9 June.
• ESI’s 9th OpenFOAM Conference, an online event, will be held 19-20 Oct 2021. The call for papers is open with a due date for your abstract by 25 Jun.
• CAASE21, the Conference on Advancing Analysis and Simulation in Engineering, will be held online on 16 June. This event is co-organized by NAFEMS and Digital Engineering magazine.
• AIAA SciTech 2022 (3-7 January) is being advertised as being held in San Diego and online. Abstracts are due 01 June.

Computing

• It’s difficult to say where on the hype cycle we are with respect to CFD and quantum computing but BosonQ Psi is working on the software now.
• byteLAKE’s latest article about their AI-accelerated CFD capabilities concludes with “CFD Suite accelerates time to results for conventional CFD solvers by a factor of at least 10x and keeps the accuracy at the level of at least 93%.”
• George Mason Univ. is receiving USAF funding to install a GPU compute cluster for CFD use.

Miscellaneous

• Precise Simulation released FEATool 1.14 and CFDTool 1.7, including MPI parallel support for OpenFOAM and SU2, as MATLAB add-ons.
• I was invited via LinkedIn to join CFD Expressions, a WhatsApp group intended to bring together CFD students and experienced professionals. I don’t use WhatsApp so I can’t join but maybe the rest of you can.

Applications, Software, and F-1

• A recent Simscale article explores “the shift in anthropological habits paralleled by modern engineering developments for both indoor and outdoor spaces.” I’m not smart enough to know what that means but the article clarifies that they’re talking about the use of simulation to model both interior and exterior built environments for comfort and safety.
• What’s new in Simcenter FLOEFD 2021.1.
• What’s new in HOOPS 2021 SP1.
• What’s new in ANSYS Discovery 2021 R1. (No, not really.) Its top 3 new features. But I count four. So confused.
• What a difference a rear wing makes. (In F-1.)
• What a difference a floor makes. (In F-1.)

$$$

• PTC reported revenue for Q1 which was more or less than same as Q1 a year ago.
• Hexagon’s revenue for Q1 was up 10%.
• ESI’s Q1 was up 1% for a company that is “reinventing itself.”
• ANSYS‘ revenue was either up a lot or flat. I’m not a money guy (that’d be my brother) so I don’t understand. What’s more interesting is what Monica Schnitger report that ANSYS’ CEO said about others entering the CFD space (i.e. Cadence). “it’s an attractive space, so he’s not surprised at the activity. But it doesn’t bother him, since Ansys has a broad, connected offering that others can’t match. When a large company acquires a point solution, it just adds to the buzz around the solution type (CFD, meshing, etc.) while, in effect, steering companies to Ansys, which can solve huge complex CFD problems and lots of others as well.” That is certainly one way to look at it.

• However, CFD can apparently make a whale fly. [Is “will it fly” the CFD equivalent of “will it blend?“]

Meshing Jobs

• Siemens Digital Industries has a job opening for a Meshing Framework Software Engineer – Advanced.
• ANSYS seeks a Senior R&D Engineer – Meshing.
• We are looking to hire a software engineer to work on the Pointwise meshing software.

Mountainous Mesh

Within natural landscapes, painter Elyse Dodge combines realism and abstraction, organic and geometric. In particular she sees grand mountain ranges as facets of slashing color. The contrast between stone and flora creates a compelling visual space.

If this style looks familiar, be reminded of digital artist Andy Walker who has been featured here previously. Unlike Dodge, Walker reduces the entire scene to triangular facets that he paints digitally.

Note: This has been quite a week for me. I attended a meeting of my Vistage group in person for the first time since October. I ate lunch in a restaurant with a friend for the first time in over a year. And I met for the first time, in 3D (as opposed to 2D online meetings) two of my new colleagues from Cadence.

P.S. Just a reminder that the World Championship Air Race is returning in 2022.

Fun: I am not responsible for a drop in productivity when you start playing with this interactive Joukowski airfoil app. Thanks, Graham.