This week’s collection of CFD ethereal flotsam and jetsam comes from my Covid-soaked mind. But don’t worry, there’s some lucidity herein. There are several items to draw you in such as a beginner’s guide to CAD data, a longish list of fun CFD stuff at AIAA Aviation next week (including free food and conviviality courtesy of Cadence), a survey on the state of cloud PLM, and all the other software releases and event news. Shown here is a cropped teaser from a video about what appears to be goopy fluid dynamics.

News

• PTC shares thoughts with DEVELOP3D about surging CAD adoption post-pandemic as part of a larger, post-pandemic digital transformation of manufacturing industries. “…upwards of 70% of product cost was already baked into the product by the time development reached the prototype stage.” This is why you want to simulate early and often.
• I haven’t finished reading the entire document, but the folks at CAD Exchanger have written a very nice Beginner’s Guide to CAD Data.
• I’m old enough to remember my mother hanging wet laundry on a clothesline in our backyard. But other than the fact that laundry day cut our football field in half, I never gave much thought to how clothes dry. Science to the rescue: How Fabrics Dry. (As first seen on FYFD.)

News from Cadence

• We announced Cadence OnCloud, our SaaS platform for cloud deployment of our computational software. Read more here and consider a free trial to put Fidelity CFD to the test.
• Three of the teams challenging for this year’s America’s Cup are using Fidelity CFD software to improve the performance of their boats.
• Cadence is an Official Technology Partner of the McLaren Formula 1 team, giving them access to Fidelity CFD for use in aero simulations of their car.
• Curious about Fidelity CFD? Check out this technical brief.
• We thank DEVELOP3D for including Fidelity CFD on their D3D 30 list of “new technologies that we believe have an important role to play in the product development processes of our readers.”

Software

• Gmsh 4.10.4 is now available.
• Datakit Version 2022.2 includes updates to virtually of of their CAD readers.
• Applied Math released CoolSim 5 for data center design optimization.
• Here’s an update from CFD Direct on their 7th year of overseeing OpenFOAM.
• Xplicit Computing announced that their new XCOMPUTE software will be available in 2022 Q3 to early adopters. They also are hiring.
• There’s a website dedicated to Code_Aster for Windows, “dedicated to Windows users, interested in using a free software for numerical simulation in structural mechanics.”

CFD for…

• a four door electric convertible. [In which we see the interior described as “vegan.”]
• gas scrubbers.
• a hydrofoil-assisted catamaran.
• stopping the spread of Covid on airplanes. [A little bit late. Maybe a plane is where I got Covid.]

Upcoming – AIAA Aviation

• AIAA Aviation will be held next week in Chicago.
• Cadence will be busy.
  • We are hosting a reception on Monday (6p-9p) for you to meet and mingle with the Cadence CFD team. [Engineers: free food and drink!]
  • Come see us in Booth 212 of the exhibition to talk about CFD and mesh generation.
  • We are authors and presenters of four technical papers.
    • Summary of Unstructured Fixed Mesh Generation Efforts for RANS Analyses by Claudio Pita and Carolyn Woeber
    • HLPW-4/GMGW-3: Overview and Workshop Summary by Chris Rumsey (NASA), Carolyn Woeber, and Jeff Slotnick (Boeing)
    • Automatic Boundary Proximity Detection and Element Sizing for B-Rep Constrained Unstructured Meshes using Distance Fields by Nick Wyman and Pat Baker
    • Output-based Mesh Adaptation Using Commercial Mesh Generation Software by Steven Allmaras (MIT), Marshall Galbraith (MIT) and Nick Wyman
• The CFD 2030 Integration Committee offers three compelling sessions.
  • Impact of AIAA-Sponsored Workshops on the CFD 2030 Vision I & II
  • Physics-Based Model Improvement and Uncertainty Quantification for the Digital Engineering Transformation
• The Digital Engineering IC offers Geometry Modeling to Support the Digital Thread
• And there are too many sessions to list on results from the recent Geometry Modeling and Mesh Generation (GMGW) and High-Lift Prediction (HLPW) workshops.

News, Events, People

• Our friends at ANSYS seem to have had a good first quarter with revenue of $425 million representing a 17% y/y growth.
• Speaking of Ansys, Engineering.com makes a prediction about what to expect from their acquisition of OnScale. “With OnScale’s native cloud experience, expect to see more Ansys tools available on a web-browser and in a streamlined, democratized UI.”
• Tech-Clarity invites you to participate in surveys on Modernizing Manufacturing Engineering and The State of Cloud PLM. BTW, congrats to T-C for their 20th anniversary.
• I feel bad about not sharing news about the SPHERIC 2022 International Workshop in time for the event (6-9 June) so I include the link here so you can see what these folks are up to.
• Congrats to Flow Science founder Tony Hirt for being recognized with the John Campbell Award for his contributions to metal casting.
• Hexagon opines that generative design is a key to sustainability.
• Sadly, Visualizing Data is ceasing publication of their Best of the Visualization Web series, something I shared here often.

Unpure Geometry

Gary Peterson’s abstractions, like Hollywood Square shown here, bring together elements that aren’t what they appear to be at first. His paintings read like a 3D relief in which my eyes try to drill down to find the ground plane. Color here becomes structure and line becomes illusory. As he wrote, “my geometric abstraction address issues of our current predicaments: uncertainty, imbalance and insecurity, with a bit of humor thrown in.” See more at the artist’s website.

Bonus: Can you become 10x more impactful than the average engineer? This article describes how. “Become a better communicator” is on the to-do list.