Happy 2022 and welcome to a new year of This Week in CFD. What do machine learning, wastewater, wind turbines, Linux, opera, and the mathematics of curves all have in common? They’re all included in this first post of the new year. And there seems to be a surge in new product releases. Mainly I’m hoping you’ll take a deep dive into the tech predictions for 2022 and share your thoughts on what you think of them. Shown here is a teaser image for an upcoming webinar on the Omnis Automotive Wizard.

CAD Exchanger 3.10.2 was released with U3D and 3D PDF export, a Python API, and much more.

Just a reminder that the 2021 Year in Review issue of Aerospace America is available with write-ups from all of the institute’s committee’s across the spectrum of technical topics including Aerospace Sciences, Propulsion and Energy, Space and Missiles, and the CFD 2030 Integration Committee.

Digital Engineering’s Technology Outlook 2022 issue includes some really interesting information. Industry expert Monica Schnitger also cited the same factoid that caught my attention. In their survey of design engineers the top two technologies predicted to be most impactful over the next five years are AI/ML and Simulation. I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that the former is a relative new technology the current use of which might be described as speculative while the latter is a mature technology that’s been around for decades. I know I need more time to think about this. Does this mean there’s a big upside ahead for simulation (adoption rates and capabilities)? Did AI/ML rank so high out of sheer hope that it will be our savior? Read it for yourself and share your interpretation in the comments. On an unrelated note, the least important thing to survey respondents about their daily work was how to get promoted.

There’s still time to register for the live online training course, New Features in Pointwise V18.5. The course will be held on 25 Jan from 10a to 2p central U.S. time.

The folks at SoftInWay share this history of reverse engineering.

A book that will probably only appeal to math and geometry geeks: Curves for the Mathematically Curious, An Anthology of the Unpredictable, Historical, Beautiful, and Romantic. [If my reading backlog wasn’t currently over 2 feet tall, I’d probably buy this.]

If I was to base my technical reading solely on the preponderance of resources on a particular topic, it’d read all these references on ML for CFD. That webpage, provided by Simulation Work, is just one of many tech papers on the topic I have piled up.

Case in point: Machine Learning for Computational Science and Engineering – A Brief Introduction and Some Critical Questions by Kadapa.

[Wait. Am I answering my own question asked above about 2022 technology?]

I’m probably touching the third rail by sharing this journal article but, “We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors.”

“PrePoMax is an open-source pre and post-processor for the Calculix FEM solver based on a modern user interface to speed up the FEM workflow.” [Am I really just cutting and pasting quotes from articles now? I thought 2022 was supposed to be better.]

Join Cadence CFD on 10 Feb for a CadenceTECHTALK on how to Accelerate Innovation with the Omnis Automotive Wizard for CFD Simulations.

ESI provides this summary of last year’s 9th OpenFOAM Conference.

The 5th 2-Day Meeting on Internal Combustion Engine Simulations Using OpenFOAM Technology will be held on 4-5 May 2022 near Darmstadt.

Here’s some academic career advice from mathematician Terence Tao. Do not let the labels academia and mathematics keep you from reading this. [Also, I like the quote he begins the article with. Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. (Erica Jong)]

COMSOL Multiphysics Version 6.0 is now available.

This is apparently somewhat controversial in the Linux world. CentOS Linux is being replaced by CentOS Stream.

Beta CAE released v22.1.0 of their software suite.

If you’re not reading FY Fluid Dynamics (aka FYFD) maybe this summary of the best of FYFD 2021 will make you a subscriber.

ParaView 5.10.0 was released.

And then there’s this study of the fluid dynamics of opera singer exhalations, complete with video. [I like fluid dynamics and opera so…]

CFD for vertical axis wind turbines. [Do not be mislead by the leading photo of a horizontal axis wind turbine.]

I like this article about NASA’s work on advancing CFD toward the goal of certification and qualification of aircraft by analysis (CQbA). I am distressed by this statement. “The single [emphasis mine] bottleneck for this work has been the generation of high-quality, curvilinear, body-fitted meshes needed for accurate large-eddy simulations.” Gonna have to dig into that.

Bonus: I will not be held responsible for time wasted spent on LiquidFun.