This is a wonderful edition of This Week in CFD if I do say so myself. Highlights include a great white paper about digital twins, a fun paper about myths in high performance computing, debate and discussion about what exactly generates an airplane’s lift, fluid dynamics in art, and pie delicious pie. Shown here are the surface pressures on blood vessels from a paper cited herein.

Event

• I teased this a while back but now it’s official. This year’s CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley event, the company’s big annual user conference, will now feature a full-day, co-located event dedicated to CFD. I invite you to join us on 19 April at the Santa Clara Convention Center for CadenceCONNECT CFD. The deadline for your presentation abstract has been extended to 17 February.

News

• The Center of Excellence in Combustion and RWTH Aachen University received an innovation award last year for their JuLES software for large eddy simulation.
• Here’s an “economical” method of computing surface heating to order h³ accuracy: Economical Third-Order Methods for Accurate Surface Heating Predictions on Simplex Element Meshes.
• Interested in digital twins? Check out this white paper from the AIAA Digital Engineering integration committee: Digital Twin: Reference Model, Realizations & Recommendations. (Registration required.)
• When you’ve got an hour and 47 minutes free, watch this masterclass with Willem Toet on Formula 1 aerodynamics.
• MUST READ ARTICLE OF THE WEEK: Myths and Legends in High-Performance Computing by Masuoka et al. Myth #6: We will soon run at zettascale!

Software

• Did you know cloudHPC released an online snappyHexMesh calculator for setting many of the parameters for this mesher for OpenFOAM?
• FluidX3D v2.3 has been released. This is “the fastest and most memory efficient lattice Boltzmann CFD software, running on all GPUs via OpenCL.”

CFD for…

• cerebral aneurysms.
• diesel exhaust from yachts.

Lift

• I’ll let those of you smarter than me [i.e. the entire readership] read A Variational Theory of Lift and tell me how significant it is for 2D flow of an ideal fluid the theory “challenges the accepted wisdom about the Kutta condition being a manifestation of viscous effects. Rather, we found that it represents conservation of momentum.”
• Read more about this and how Lift keeps an airplane in the air in this article from Aerospace America featuring Paul Bevilaqua (Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, retired) and Haithem Taha (co-author of the paper cited above).
• And related to lift is “How do winglets improve aerodynamics?” from Wouter at AirShaper. [Spoiler: They effectively increase the wing’s aspect ratio.]

On Fluids and Art

LOL, not what you’ve come to expect from this blog, eh? I found this wonderful article by Prof. Rouslan Krechetnikov from the Univ. of Alberta [where son #2 attended graduate school] on Depictions of Fluid Phenomena in Art. Allow me to quote directly:

Aivazovsky wrote:“A painter, who just copies nature, becomes its slave, with his limbs tied up. The living elements (of nature) are elusive to an artist’s brush.” The same can be said about a scientist attempting to understand the nature of the surrounding world, which keeps revealing ever-increasing levels of complexity and thus is elusive in its entirety.

Bonus: Anyone who’d write an article about impossible geometry must’ve done mesh generation because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stared at a geometry model muttering “That can’t possibly be right.”

2nd Bonus: A brief history of the C programming language. “C was success born of failure.” My copy of Kernighan and Ritchie is well worn.