
Welcome to the 500th edition of This Week in CFD on the Another Fine Mesh blog. Over 12 years ago we decided to start blogging to connect with CFDers across teh interwebs. “Out-teach the competition” was the mantra. Almost immediately we learned how difficult it was to select worthy topics and write something quasi-intelligent about them. [You might argue that the quasi-intelligent goal remains elusive.] This Week in CFD was born out of that frustration. I had already been compiling CFD news for in-house use (“business intelligence” to use a fancy phrase). So why not share it with the CFD world? And so here we are. A lot has changed, a lot hasn’t. As one alert reader has said, the level of “snark” doesn’t seem to have diminished nor has the silliness. And to many a reader’s frustration, I continue to share art that interests me. Because I can. And now to the news which today will be a random walk through my bookmarks. [And now you’re scratching your head wondering what kind of pattern or order was in the previous editions.]

For those of you in the mechanical simulation world who are still asking What Does Cadence Do?, here’s your answer.
Forgive me for repeating this, but I still love this story from 2007 about the U.S. postage stamp featuring CFD on a mesh generated in Gridgen.

ICYMI, Cadence and Fidelity CFD had a good showing at the NVIDIA GTC 2023.
- The performance of our GPU-accelerated flow solver was mentioned by Jensen Huang in his keynote.
- Cadence VP of R&D Ben Gu presented Optimizing Formula One with Fidelity.
- Cadence’s Frank Ham and Sanjeeb Bose presented Machine-Learned Sensitivity Extraction from Synthetic High-Fidelity Simulation Databases. (Subject of a future blog post.)
Speaking of Formula One (Formula-One, Formula-1, F-1), you do know that Cadence is an Official Technology Partner of the McLaren Formula 1 Team, right?
Have you watched Flexcompute’s CFD Essentials video series on YouTube? It starts with turbulence modeling and currently has five parts in the series. This is where I inject my favorite joke about turbulence modeling (or is it about mesh generation?).
Mesh generation exists in order to make turbulence modeling seem respectable by comparison.

Elysium announced CADdoctor SX6.1 with updated CAD format and Windows 11 support.
Beta CAE released v23.0.3 of their software suite.
Coreform was awarded a $1.6M DoE grant to port Coreform IGA to GPUs.
I swear, this is the last time I’ll share this podcast I did with Digital Engineering on the evolution of CFD.
And while we’re on the topic of CFD’s evolution and gibberish I’ve said or written, here’s an article on the evolution of computational aerospace and CFD.
If you bookmarked those articles I posted a while about about the history of CFD and various CFD companies, here’s something to add to that collection: the partnership between Convergent Science and IDAJ.

OpenVSP 3.32.0 was released.
The 14th Asian CFD Conference will be held 30 Oct – 02 Nov 2023 in Karnataka, India. Abstracts are due by 15 May.
CFD for Neanderthal noses.
Abstracts are now being accepted for this August’s Thermal & Fluids Analysis Workshop (TFAWS). Due date is 21 July.
I haven’t yet had a chance to read The Future of CFD Simulation in the Chemical Process Industries but I’ve added it to my collection of similar documents going all the way back to the CFD Vision 2030 Study.
Maybe the conclusion will convince you to read the paper. “Overall, our results suggest that high-order methods and second-order, energy-conserving approaches based on the IBM [immersed boundary method] may be both viable options for high-fidelity scale-resolving simulations of turbulent flows with separation.” DNS of Turbulence Flow Over a Sphere

Here’s a quick summary of OnShape’s user conference.
CFD shows that flat plate bow covers on can decrease wind drag on ships by over 40%.
It’s as though FYFD knows that I love black and white line animation. Check out FLOW from MIT.

When you an hour [or 30 minutes if you play videos at 2x like I do], see what’s new in HOOPS 2023.
CFD for guide vanes in an axial flow fan.
“The highly visual nature of CFD inspired me to get creative with engineering,” says Shini Somara, author of the children’s book Engineers Making a Difference. [It’s not too early to buy Xmas gifts, is it?]
Cadence’s CEO and president, Dr. Anirudh Devgan shared his thoughts on The End of Technology As We Know It, and the Rise of Computational Software at U.C. Berkeley recently.
The CFD Impact Conference is coming up on 04 July at Technion in Israel.

Can you tile the plane with a shape that doesn’t result in periodicity? The answer is yes. And this is big enough news that it was included in Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Introducing the “hat,” An Aperiodic Monotile.

From this past summer’s International Conference on CFD comes Hypersonic Simulation with US3D Using Unstructured Grids from Fidelity Pointwise.
CIMdata commented on how Cadence has embraced high-fidelity CFD.
Computing hardware is not my strong suit so you’ll have to read on to understand why having 1.2GB of L2+L3 cache is good news for CFD in AMD’s EPYC Genoa-X.
How simulation can help overcome the three main EVTOL challenges.
Pointbasis is a cloud-based modeling and simulation as a service platform. [Did I mention this before? This is why my lovely wife thinks I have cognitive decline which is a polite way of saying the elevator no longer goes all the way to the penthouse.]

[I have a love-hate relationship with market research firms after getting stiffed by a firm after offering them some data. But here we go.] Markets and Research reports that the global CFD market in 2022 was $2B and is expected to reach $3.8B by 2030. All this and more at the link.
And the IMARC Group says that the entire CAE market will be worth $16.6B by 2028.
CFD for nuclear reactor safety.
Vertical magazine profiles CFD provider AirShaper and their work in the EVTOL market.
CFD for data centers.
It’s time for you to take a few minutes and share your thoughts and opinions with NAFEMS in their Future of Simulation survey.
To list all the things I don’t understand would take a lifetime of blog posts. But one thing I don’t understand is this article about how the cloud is solving CAE interoperability problems. I’m not picking on the Autodesk person quoted in this article for saying “Different CAD formats can coexist in the cloud because ‘the cloud normalizes them.'” I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m saying I don’t understand.
Watch how Hermeus Is Reaching for Mach 5 with Cadence’s Fidelity Pointwise and Fidelity CFD Solutions. [This is cool stuff.]
Tecplot users: ever wonder what type of computer runs Tecplot best? Check out this blog post.
A table of analogies mapping the mechanical and electrical worlds to each other.
Laminar2 Turbulent is a CFD consultancy based in Australia.
Good advice in here: Writing a [Technical] Paper.
From the Royal Aeronautical Society comes this recorded lecture by Doug Greenwell on The 21st Century Renaissance of the Transonic Wind Tunnel.
The fascinating physics of insect pee.
Not related to the previous post: an interactive page that illustrates the shape of a liquid droplet under various conditions.
I may have linked to this before or I may have shared it on LinkedIn. But it’s worth repeating. MUST READ: Myths and Legends of HPC by Satoshi Matsuoka et al.
NextSim: next-generation, industrial aerodynamic simulation code.

Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction
Dassault Systemes has an internship opening for a Aerothermal Applied CFD Engineer for Jun-Dec 2023.
I have no idea why I’ve been sitting on this article about the U.S. Air Force’s redesign of Santa’s sled for hypersonic flight.
I sat on the article Some Thoughts on Style in Science so long I no longer have access to the PDF.
ICYMI, Rocky DEM is now part of Ansys.
Popular Science shared 2022’s aerospace innovations [Page title says “greatest,” page URL says “best,” article headline says “most awesome.” Whatevs.] leading with the James Webb Space Telescope.

OpenQBMM 10.0.0 for OpenFOAM (for multiphase flows) was released back in December.
Beta CAE v23.1.0 was released as was OpenFOAM v2212.
The 17th SPHERIC (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics rEsearch and Engineering International Community) International Conference will be held in Rhodes, Greece on 27-29 June 2023.
CFD for an ultra-thin, electric refrigeration unit.
This is a very interesting topic and approach: A Transformer-Based Synthetic Inflow Generator for Spatially-Developing Turbulent Boundary Layers.
It’s nice to see two friends of Fidelity CFD getting along: Lockheed Martin Skunk Works is partnering with McLaren on supercar design.

Ever want to watch a spur gear get meshed in GridPro?
A new faster way to solver linear equations involves “trained divination.”
[Back up on the soap box:] The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Theoretical Framework for the Assessment of Continuous Colormaps
Trust me, you’ll want to at least watch this video. Green Coordinates for TriQuad Cages in 3D
How simulation is changing and what you need to do to keep up.
CFD for sand dunes.
CFD for older ships.

CFD for pollen risk.
Beta CAE’s 9th Before Reality Conference is coming up on 14-16 June in Munich. The CFP is open with a due date of 21 April.
DEVELOP3D puts chips head to head for engineering workstations: 13th Gen Intel Core vs AMD Ryzen 7000.
Emerging Trends for ML in CFD. And ML for Turbulence Modeling.
Coreform Cubit 2022.11 was released for mesh generation.
Winners of the 2022 HPC Innovation Excellence awards.
Researchers have proven definitively the 3D Euler singularity which in turn may have prove a 3D Navier-Stokes singularity.

From a recap of SC22 (aka Supercomputing 2022): cloud HPC is confusing.
[As if insect pee wasn’t enough (see above)], how physics can improve the urinal.
Just a reminder for fluid afficianados to visit the gallery of fluid motion from time to time.
Cyclists, how about your own personal wind tunnel?
The soccer ball used in the 2022 World Cup apparently had quite good aerodynamic properties. [Why do they change the ball design every time given how impactful that can be on play?]
Given the start of baseball season here in the U.S., here’s a look back at a 1959 study of baseball spin versus speed.
JFM Notebooks are definitely a step in the right direction: an online companion for printed technical papers that provides alternate, interactive, higher resolution version of images on the page.
The good news: Kitchen flows: Making science more accessible, affordable, and curiosity driven. [Although I question why Culinary Fluid Dynamics wasn’t in the title.] The bad news: not a single image in the entire paper. Not. a. single. one. Accessible?
I’ll leave you with this phenomenal work by Simon Fischer. Not only did he coin the word “InFLOWencer,” he wrote this blog post about the heroes of fluid mechanics. This is worth reading. Twice.

Thank You: To all the alert readers of This Week in CFD who have honored me with their suggestions , their questions, and just their readership – thank you. This blog is my “love letter” to CFD. To know that others have enjoyed it means a lot. Here’s to more love for CFD in the future.