It’s Friday and time to get #NavierStoked. (I warned you that I’d steal that.) This week’s theme seems to be food with three food-specific CFD applications including the Application of the Week. (The other applications may be edible but not easily so.) And before delving into all the news, we begin with several articles about workplace culture, promoting STEM via social media, and gamification. Shown here is an illustration of an electron whirlpool, fluid-like behavior in electrons that could be used for future low-power computing. This is something that provides common ground for the Fidelity CFD team (fluids) and the traditional Cadence EDA folks (electrons). [Assuming they have the patience to help me understand the secret lives of electrons.]

There’s a paradox in “social media for engineering” given that engineers have an undeserved reputation for being anti-social. [How do you know when an engineer is an extrovert? They look at your shoes when talking to you.] DEVELOP3D expresses an opinion that effective use of social media can promote STEM and engage the next generation of engineers.

Social media is just one aspect of the gamification of CFD as expressed by Julien de Charentenay earlier this year. While social media helps with engagement, other aspects of gamification are CFD contests and apps designed specifically for playing with fluid dynamics. Julien wonders how long it will be before commercial software providers allow users to earn points and badges for activities (e.g. CPU hours on a cloud platform, online tutorials mastered, questions answered on a forum.)

While we’re on so-called “soft skills” (never forget what Tom Peters says: “Soft skills are hard.”) consider this article about engineering workplace culture. (Your workplace has a culture regardless of whether it’s one you actively promote or one that evolved organically.) A strong culture maximizes play, purpose, and potential while minimizing emotional and economic stress and inertia (according to the article).

I’m the guy who likes to mesh a geometry model of a Klein bottle so who am I to judge, but I can’t quite figure out the purpose of simulating vortex dynamics on a Mobius strip.

SIAM International Meshing Roundtable news:

• The event will be held in Amsterdam on 6-9 Mar 2023.
• The call for papers is open and your full manuscript is due 16 Sept.
• The geometry model for the meshing contest is now available for you to begin meshing. (See image below.)

A technical paper on Skylon Aerodynamics and SABRE Plumes with CFD by Cart3D. (See image below.)

New [to me] is HORSES3D, a “High-Order (DG) Spectral Element Solver.”

The 18th OpenFOAM Workshop will be held in Genoa, Italy in 2023. The workshop seeks a host for the 2024 event.

Here are the winners of the Visualization Showcase from AIAA Aviation this past June.

Beta CAE released v23.0.0 of their software suite.

It’s time for a brief video history of the Navier-Stokes equations including a lot of people not named Navier or Stokes.

Intelligent Light has an opening for a software engineer.

Tecplot 360 2022 R1 is now available with a preview of high-order support and much more. Here’s more on the new release from DEVELOP3D.

SOLIDWORKS 2023 Beta is now available for you to preview. [When did the name morph from Solidworks to SOLIDWORKS?]

OpenFOAM v10 is now available.

Will Carbon be the successor to C++? You tell me.

ICYMI, you can watch the recorded presentations from CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley.

Quanscient is offering early access to their cloud-based quantum computing platform for fluid dynamics.

On the topic of F-1, Ferrari’s cars are said to have 3D printed titanium break [sic] pedals.

Xplicit Computing has made available on GitHub Messages, “a file & wire schema designed for engineers and scientists that enables numerical and related data to be shared across high-performance computing sessions and programming environments.”

What’s the difference between a neural network and a physics-informed neural network? Seems it has something do with a loss function. [At this stage of my career, I’m like a physics-informed manager.]

Have you registered yet for the ENGYS UGM 2022 in Detroit on 20-21 September?

CFD for design of a bio-inspired proton exchange membrane fuel cell.

Siemens Digital Industries Software acquired ZONA Technology for their aeroelastic simulation capabilities.

CGAL 5.5, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library, was released.

OK, so it seems the application theme this week is food. Here’s how you use CFD to simulate food drying from our friends at Airflow Sciences.

How much money are people spending on HPC? According to Hyperion, $35 billion in 2021 with growth to $50 billion in 2026. Not surprisingly, slightly under 60% of current spending is on servers and storage with only 15% going to cloud.

When I admitted getting through my undergrad and grad studies without ever having taken a linear algebra course [<smh>Yes, it’s true.</smh>] several people recommended the course from MIT’s Gilbert Strang, freely available online.

CFD for a $5,500 road bike chassis.

Alison Hall’s paintings are thematically about pattern, repetition, and ritual. I could say the same thing about meshes. Yet rather than being sterile and overly defined, they exhibit an unending openness and a shimmering visual field that traps you. See more at the artist’s website. (First seen on Hyperallergic.)

Bonus: First-ever atomic resolution video of salt crystals forming in real time