Let’s begin this week’s CFD news dump (a less artful term than curation) with jobs and it seems there are a lot of them. We also have a couple articles of the type that make you go “Hmm” – one on open research, the other of passion being detrimental. And among all the other software and application news there’s one bit of software noted that’s not directly CFD but I bet all of us could’ve used at one time or another. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which one I’m referring to. The image shown here recalls the time our friends at CRAFT Tech and NAVAIR meshed an aircraft carrier to do a wind over deck simulation. We used to have coffee mugs with this image on them it’s so cool.

Jobs

• Our friends at Tecplot have an opening for a Technical Support Specialist. [Tecplot would be a great company to work for.]
• NASA Johnson Space Center’s Flight Sciences Lab seeks someone to lead their HPC center.
• In the UK, the Univ. of Huddersfield has a funded PhD project to study indoor humidity using CFD.
• Simscale has many job openings including a senior CAD developer.
• Cadence has an opening for software engineers in Brussels in the areas of aeroacoustics, high order, and more.
• Cadence has an opening for a software engineer in Fort Worth in the area of meshing.

Events

• Undergraduate students attending SC21 (planned to be in-person!) have until 28 June to apply for the HPC Immersion program which guides them through the event and its experiences.
• Registration (free!) is open for this summer’s International Meshing Roundtable, an online event, on 21-25 June.
• APS DFD 2021 will be held in-person (!) on 21-23 November in Phoenix. Your abstract is due 02 Aug.

News from Cadence Including the Companies Formerly Known as Numeca and Pointwise and This May Be the Longest Blog Headline I’ve Ever Written.

• Cadence launched [unleashed] Clarity 3D Solver Cloud, access to cloud-based HPC resources at AWS for electromagnetic field simulations for PCBs.
• Cadence released FINE/Marine V10.1.
• Cadence released Pointwise V18.4 R4. [And it’s already been cracked! I’ve seen the tweets!]
• Both the former Numeca and former Pointwise teams are hiring. See above.

Grab Bag

• Altair launched Altair One, “a single portal for Altair’s products, accessible anywhere” from virtually any platform, providing access to HPC cloud resources.
• The International Society of CFD’s website is now up and running. Learn more about how this organization plans to foster collaboration in the world of CFD.
• Why open research?
• Here’s a collection of invited papers on machine learning in fluid mechanics. [Snarky comment just for Jeff.]
• Ansys acquired Phoenix Integration for their MBSE expertise.
  • Enjoy this joint case study involving Phoenix Integration and Pointwise on CAD-Based Design Optimization of a Race Car Front Wing.
• CFD Support shares some recommendations for the computing hardware needed to run CFD. The recommendation to get as much RAM as possible is not surprising. I’ll quibble a little bit about labeling the graphics card as “not that critical.”

Software

• WebPlotDigitizer: Have you ever needed to “reverse engineer” an XY plot to extract it’s actual numerical data? Back in the day we did that by hand with a paper template the size of an index card onto which were scribed various scales that hopefully matched the scale in the printed plot. Now there’s an open source [opensource, open-source?] app that looks really handy.
• Video: The Basics of Meshing (in SimScale)
• Fascinating two-part video series from Keenan Crane at Carnegie Mellon Univ. on the topic of Geometry Processing with Intrinsic Triangulations. Part 1. Part 2.
• PowerFLOW now does compressibility.
• Cranfield University’s UCNS3D flow solver is open-source and high-order.
• Spatial released 2021 1.0.1 including meshing for built environments.
• ICYMI, Distene is now part of Dassault Systemes and their software is now known as 3D Precise Mesh (formerly MeshGems or GHS3D). [I’ll resist the temptation to tease my friends Mark and Laurent about what an imprecise mesh is. And yes, I’ve given them a perfect softball to see whether they’ll take the bait.]

CFD for…

• heat exchangers in rotary engines for unmanned vehicles.
• aircraft engine nacelles. [Nice article from our GridPro friends.]
• motorcycle radiators. [I had no idea Husqvarna made motorcycles.]
• the Cadillac Lyriq. (See image above.)
• sports stadiums. (See animated image above.)
• surfboards.
  • Watch this on-demand webinar with CRAFT Tech as they demonstrate Big Wave Surfboard Optimization Using Pointwise and CRUNCH CFD.

Grid, Heal Thyself

If you stare at the center of this grid long enough, the regularity seems to push toward the left and right boundaries and improve the mesh quality in those regions.

If only it were that easy in practice. See more at Healing Grid on illusionoftheyear.com.

Speaking of illusions, check out Impossible Grid Typography, 3rd place winner of Best Illusion of the Year for 2020.

Bonus: Consider this interesting viewpoint – obsessing over a person’s passion for aerospace is counterproductive.