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.

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.”

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.
- An introduction to ASM, showing how quickly and easily you can generate a high-quality surface mesh.
- Tools for visualizing geometry characteristics, setting resolution and meshing goals, and viewing the quality of the resultant surface mesh.
- The many methods for customizing the automation available in ASM.
- Controls for changing the display of geometry model entities and applying Resolution and Mapping filters.
- Specify which edges have convex, concave, and curvature designations.

CFD for…
- classic Ferrari reproductions.
- small monohull racing yachts.
- large diameter ceiling fans.

Events
- Join Cadence CFD for Simulation of Hydraulic Turbines with the Omnis CFD Platform on December 15th during which you’ll get an introduction to the Cadence Omnis Open-PBS flow solver.
- Simulation Data Management (SDM or SPDM) gets the NAFEMS treatment in 20 Years of SPDM in Production, a video interview with Mark Norris.
- At their recent user conference, Hexagon announced their CAE strategy which is built around eight centers of excellence (one is CFD) led by an “entrepreneurially-minded specialist” with a thread of AI running throughout.
- The NVIDIA GTC 2022 is scheduled for 21-24 March in San Jose.
- Siemens Realize LIVE Americas will be held 9-12 May 2022 in Las Vegas.
- SIGGRAPH 2022 will be held in Vancouver on 7-11 Aug.
- SC22 (aka Supercomputing) will be in Fort Worth’s neighbor, Dallas, on 13-18 Nov 2022.

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.
