This Week in CFD

Welcome to another gaggle of news from the world of CFD and computational simulation. It would be a shame to not lead with the International Meshing Roundtable. Included herein are articles about a very cool application of flow jets to provide V/STOL capabilities and a list of tips for engineering students. Speaking of students, you are invited to apply for the two summer internships here in Fort Worth. Other things you’ll find inside are nasal surgery, the 3rd Automotive CFD Workshop, hydrogen combustion, plenty of job openings, and the proverbial much, much more. Shown here is Seattle’s Space Needle in a Mach 4 flow. Read that again slowly. You’ll have to read on to learn why.

ICYMI, earlier this week we shared a legendary bit of CFD humor titled Will the Wind Tunnel Replace the Computer.

And while I’m sending you to our other CFD blog, here’s my summary of the SIAM International Meshing Roundtable with all the winners of the “best” awards including the coveted Meshing Maestro, shown below.

Alert reader Joe pointed me at this article about the use of CFD as part of an overall treatment plan for nasal surgery. [As a person with a deviated septum, I endorse this work. Hard to imagine a snarky kid like me getting punched in the nose a lot.]

Williams Advanced Engineering has an opening for an Engineer – CFD.

This meshing contest entry at the IMR by a NASA team consisting of Mike Park, Ray Gomez, and Bil Kleb was recognized with the coveted Meshing Maestro award. See link above.

The 3rd Automotive CFD Workshop (AutoCFD3) has been announced as an in-person event in Barcelona on 22-23 Sept 2022. The deadline to submit a notice of participation is 17 March.

I discovered THINK Fluid Dynamix (“Advanced fluid simulation for the water & process industry”) by their video of a Rushton turbine computed with LES.

One of my fellow bloggers here at Cadence, Paul McLellan, wrote a distillation of Benedict Evan’s annual report on trends in tech and simplified it so even a meshing guy could understand it. The future is primarily Web3 (aka crypto) and Metaverse (aka AR/VR). [What’s old is new again. How can we rebrand meshing? Discrete Reality or DR? Facetverse?] And the present is about deploying the last decade’s future: SaaS, cloud, ML, etc.

CFD simulation of a very cool concept of using slip-stream deflection to provide V/STOL capabilities without rotating mechanical components. From CoFlow Jet and NASA.

Our friends at Autodesk had a good Q4 with revenue up 17% to over $1.2B.

Lifecycle Insights has an opening for an Industry Analyst in Electronics, Electrical, and Software Engineering.

While we’re on the topic of positions needing to be filled, we have plenty of CFD openings here at Cadence. In Fort Worth we have four openings: two for summer interns and two for application engineers. (The application engineer positions require someone who can work with ITAR-controlled articles.) In Brussels we have 11 openings including software engineers and product engineers.

Screen capture from a video of an Ansys Fluent simulation of combustion inside an aero engine. The video is mesmerizing so click thru to Realize the Sustainable Promise of Hydrogen Combustion.

I don’t see many people writing new multi-block structured grid generators so Hexgrid stands out.

In his article Ten Mistakes Every Engineering Student Should Avoid, #3 is having bad communication skills. Well worth reading and given time I want to delve into it deeper and comment on all ten. For example, on the topic of whether you need to attend every lecture I’d say that depends on your learning style and wouldn’t categorically say it’s unnecessary.

CFD for flue gas desulfurization.

Cadence’s Ben Gu (VP R&D) describes the intelligent systems driving your automobile. [They had better be intelligent because I can’t figure out what most of the little gizmos are.]

Artist Conrad Shawcross is fascinated by tetrahedra. (Aren’t we all?) What I didn’t know was that as a Platonic solid, the tet was said to represent the element fire. (And there’s your cue to rename your tet mesher around the fire theme. Blaze would be a cool name for a mesher.) But I didn’t discover Shawcross directly because an alert reader pointed me first at the Numberphile video The Tetrahedral Boat from which I learned about Shawcross.

Conrad Shawcross, Paradigm Decay (Structural), 2013. Image from conradshawcross.com. See link above.
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4 Responses to This Week in CFD

  1. Zach Davis says:

    John, are the NASA folks here adapting the anisotropic unstructured grid for their winning Meshing Maestro entry all the way to the wall boundaries, or is this still off-body adaptation?

    • John Chawner says:

      Hi, Zach. NASA’s refine software was used for the adaptation which handles both surface and volume meshes. Therefore, I infer that this particular case adapts everything.

  2. Jeff Layton says:

    I worked with Bob Coopersmith for a few years as I think a number of people have. He’s an amazingly bright person with a wicked sense of humor. I enjoyed seeing his “CFD article” article again – thanks for posting it!

    Jef

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