This Week in CFD

Tsoutsanis as published on springer.com.

This is the first edition of This Week in CFD in the last month of 2021 meaning that there are only two or three more left until we put 2021 to bed. It’s been a great year for CFD if this week’s news is any indication. The “must read” article of the week is very well done article about CFD for F-1 aerodynamics done by a masters student. Speaking of students, Aviation Week chose their 20 Twenties: know any of the finalists? Still speaking about students, AIAA’s A&D workforce study should be of great interest to them as they complete their university work and transition to the workforce. And ICYMI, you’ll find here links to the video demonstrations of how the updated Flashpoint Automatic Surface Meshing works in the new Pointwise V18.5. Shown here is a portion of the “image of the week” showing interaction of a shock wave with a water column.

Reading

  • Cadence’s Ben Gu delves into intelligent systems in this Forbes Technology Council article.
  • Speaking of articles by Cadence folks, Steve Brown wrote in EE Times about verification planning.
  • Unintentional but serendipitous: my Cadence colleague David Waltzman contributed to this Digital Engineering article about Multiphysics Sparks Innovation in Electronics Design.
  • Non-sequitur: Pondering Einstein’s quote that “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” [What does that mean for those of us who don’t know? What’s below fool?]
  • The SolidWorks blog takes a look at the results of a recent Tech Clarity survey and asks whether engineers are to blame for missing launch dates nearly half the time? [Oddly, Zoom meetings aren’t mentioned.]
  • Every issue since 1916 is available in the Complete Aviation Week Archive.
  • Speaking of Aviation Week, the 2021 class of 20 Twenties (20 accomplished STEM students) is online.
  • The 2021 Aerospace & Defense Workforce study is summarized here and the full report can be obtained here (registration required). Factoids: the majority of the workforce has fewer than 10 years of tenure, 46% of the workforce is age 46 or older.
Thanks to alert reader Chris and others for pointing me at this xkcd webcomic. Like all good humor, it’s based on a kernel of truth. Just say “no” to sickly green CFD images.

News

  • Our friends at ANSYS raked in $441 million in Q3, an increase of 20% over the same quarter last year.
  • Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for May 2021.
  • Tech Soft 3D launched their VIP Program to highlight “shining stars of our community and their contributions.”
MUST SEE: Well, you’ll have to “must read” in order to “must see” this sumptuous image illustrating the interaction of a shock wave with a water column from the paper CWENO Finite-Volume Interface Capturing Schemes for Multicomponent Flows Using Unstructured Meshes by Tsoutsanis, et al. Image from springer.com.

Pointwise V18.5

Cadence Pointwise Meshing Version 18.5 was recently released and among the plethora of new features are upgrades to Flashpoint Automatic Surface Meshing (ASM). In this third week of the launch event we shared five videos that demonstrate the updates.

Pointwise Version 18.5 with new Flashpoint Automatic Volume Meshing and updated Flashpoint Automatic Surface Meshing.

CFD for…

Example of electric motor cooling in the 5.1 release of FIFTY2 Technology’s PreonLab 5.1. Image from fifty2.eu.

Events

MUST READ: This visualization of skin friction as computed using STAR-CCM+ comes from an article on LinkedIn by MASc student David Penner on F-1 aerodynamics. Very nice work.

Software

  • Lifecycle Insights shares their thoughts on the evolution of ANSYS Discovery and how it serves as a platform that bridges the needs of designers, engineers, and analysts.
  • Have you ever had a printed XY graph and wanted to get the actual data from it? There are at least two bits of software that will do that from a scanned image. Mcalibration is a commercial tool, g3data is open source. [I have an index-card sized bit of cardboard with scales of various sizes on them that you can use to do this manually.]
  • Our friends at the OpenFOAM Foundation have begun their annual solicitation of funding for the coming year by asking folks to purchase a maintenance plan for the software to help them achieve their goal of €250,000.
  • CFDTool 1.7 includes full parallel support for SU2 and OpenFOAM.
  • ENGYS released HELYX v3.4.0.
  • Open CASCADE released Open CASCADE Technology 7.6.0.
  • Tecplot RS 2021 R1 was released for reservoir simulation post-processing.
  • Simcenter SPH Flow and Simcenter SPH Flow Studio 2.3 are now available.
  • modeFRONTIER 2021R3 is now available.

The Mesh as Control

Gloria Klein systematized her approach to art beginning in the 1970s where her painstaking and deliberate mark-making seems to have been a statement about maintaining control. Some of her work from that period not only presages a lot of current “digitalization” in abstract painting but may have been a commentary on the women’s lib movement because of its visual similarity to the “women’s work” of sewing and quilting.

To learn more about Klein, see Christie’s and two websites dedicated to the artist: gloriaklein.website and gloriakleinart.com.

Gloria Klein, Fuchsia Light #5, 2011. source
This entry was posted in Applications, Events, News, Software and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply