On this last Friday of October 2021 (meaning that we’re on the slow slide into year’s end and the holiday season – for many of us – of Thanksgiving, Xmas, and New Year’s Day), we’ve got a really broad selection of CFD items. Some of the best news is the return of in-person conferences and workshops. And how about nasal CFD, AI, misconceptions, trees, firearms, and a motorcycle with a hole through it. And for those who seek, there are plenty of jobs to be found. Shown here is a nice demonstration of the use of topology in a structured grid to overcome one of a structured grid’s traditional challenges; unwanted propagation of clustering. This mesh is by Hesam Tofighian. It even had me fooled at first.

Events

• The ASSESS 2022 Congress will be in Atlanta on 1-3 May. Attendance is limited so register as soon as you can.
  • The congress is the main annual event of the ASSESS Initiative.
  • The ASSESS acronym stands for Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Strategies. [Never forget the last S.]
  • The initiative “is a broad reaching multi-industry initiative with a primary goal to facilitate a revolution of enablement that will vastly increase the availability and utility of Engineering Simulation, leading to significantly increased usage and business benefits across the full spectrum of industries, applications and users.”
• The 2022 Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineering Congress (5-8 June, Edmonton) will include a symposium on CFD. Abstracts are due 28 January.
• The AIAA CFD 2030 Integration Committee is hosting two events at the SciTech Forum in January in San Diego [IN PERSON – hope to see you there].
  • A technical paper session on NASA’s Revolutionary Computational Aerosciences
  • A double-header technical panel on the Impact of AIAA-Sponsored CFD Workshops on the CFD 2030 Vision.
• Speaking of AIAA SciTech, two awesome CFD workshops will be held in San Diego.
  • The combined 4th AIAA CFD High Lift Prediction Workshop and the 3rd AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop.
  • The 1st AIAA High Fidelity CFD Workshop (formerly High-Order)

News

• MUST WATCH VIDEO. The comments on Twitter about Doug McLean’s lecture on Common Misconceptions in Aerodynamics have all been good so be sure to watch. Come for the science but stay for the video’s subtitle: An Argumentative Aerodynamicist Gets Old and Cranky and Takes Issue with Just About Everyone.
• For those of you interested in the application of AI to CFD, here’s a list of resource material about what byteLAKE is doing.
• The DoE (through Lawrence Livermore National Labs) is getting 40 petaFLOPs worth of Dells.
• CFD through S-ducts was a big part of my early career (i.e. F-16 and similar inlets) from freestream up to maps of compressor face distortion. So naturally I was drawn to this article from our friends at GridPro about structured grids for S-ducts.
• So if you read the GridPro article and then look at the airfoil at the top of this post you’d probably think (like I did) that it too was generated with GridPro. As it turns out, the airfoil is a Pointwise grid in which the same principles have been applied but in a different way.
• Hybrid mesh modeling in SolidWorks 2022 (what we’d call discrete geometry modeling).

CFD for…

• the V-Air motorcycle, the one with a big hole down the middle. [I’m curious about the total front-facing area and whether it’s smaller than a traditional motorcycle and what, if anything, happens to the air in the tunnel.]
• a smog tower than filters air and makes it 80% cleaner.
• underwater power plants. [Why do fish need all that power?]
• atomic layer deposition batch reactors.
• the Aura electric sports car.
• minimizing recoil energy from a long gun with a compensator. (Watch the video.) Thank you to alert reader David for the link.
• Don’t forget to check in on the Cadence CFD Automotive Series of videos.

Jobs

• Siemens Digital Industries has an opening for a Technical Marketing Engineer – CFD.
• Cadence has these openings and many others.
  • Account Technical Executive – CFD in Texas
  • Software Engineer Post Processing in Brussels
• Ceres Power seeks to hire a CFD Engineer.
• AMD seeks an Application Software Optimization Engineer – CFD, HPC.
• Altair has an opening for a Senior CFD Software Developer
• ANSYS needs an R&D Engineer II – CFD.

C’mon Man, Not Another Painting of an Array of Squares

I’ve been thinking about Ellsworth Kelly a lot lately, maybe because a trip to Austin to see Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin seems pretty reasonable and likely in the near future.

But on the subject at hand, many abstract painters do explore this idea of an array of similar shapes. Sometimes squares, sometimes circles. Sometimes a full array, sometimes a sparse array. Sometimes a bright rainbow of colors, sometimes a narrow, muted band.

Engineers should be comfortable with the idea of minimalism. What’s that oft-cited quote about good engineering is about removing all excess? From the standpoint of painting, what’s the least amount of form or color you can use to express an idea? Or by giving up conscious control at the time of creation you allow the viewer to create their own narrative from the work.