This Week in CFD

Good Reading

The Philosophy of Simulation Software Development was a headline certain to get my attention. In the article, MSC Software’s VP of product development writes that “product development is about the connectedness of different departments within an organization” and much more. [I swear I only recently told someone that all engineering occurs at the interfaces.]
Mentor Graphics is offering a white paper (registration required) in which they ask “Why is CFD so difficult to democratize?“
NASA’s offer of cash prizes to speed up CFD code FUN3D is getting wide publicity, most recently in Aviation Week (subscription required). If any of you are going to enter this contest, let me know.
On LinkedIn, Lubos Pirkl describes how the CFD code of the future needs to be automatable, capable, integrable, and scalable.
What we still don’t get about numerical error.

Read about how EXN/Aero was used to simulate the ONERA M6 wing at transonic conditions at a cost of $324.

Applications & News

Capvidia’s FlowVision CFD solver is being used to simulate blood flow in Dassault Systemes’ Living Heart Project.
You’ll soon be able to access the supercomputing power of a Cray in the cloud.
DEVELOP3D interviewed the CEO of SimSolid and discussed how they are able to simulate complex parts without meshing. [You have no idea how hard it was for me to type those last two words.]
Is the “Superman tuck” the most aerodynamically optimal for cycling? [It certainly can’t be the most comfortable.] Read more from Symscape.
Congratulations to Daat, makers of the Coolit CFD software, on the 25th anniversary of the company’s founding.
Although the full article requires a subscription, Aviation Week included a head-scratcher in the title Wind Tunnels Have Future in Digital Age, Europeans Say [emphasis mine]. I’m fairly certain that’s not a Euro-centric viewpoint.

Comparison of temperatures from infrared imaging (left) and FloTHERM XT simulation results (right) for a tablet computer. Image from ElectronicDesign.com. Read full article here.

Software

asymmetric-hull-flow

SOLIDWORKS Education Edition 2017-2018 was launched with a slew of new capabilities.
RealFlow 10.1 was released, the most amazing result [to me] of which is a simulation of ground beef being cut.
CAESES 4.2.1 was released.
Applied CCM released Caelus v7.04.
ANSYS 18.1 was released with CFD improvements in transient flows, harmonic analysis, and improved visualization among other enhancements.
Altair released Flux 12.3 for EM simulation.
Here’s news about the CFD solver HiFUN, an unstructured CFD solver targeting aerospace applications [about which I only became aware recently].
What is the optimum number of compute cores for FEA?

ANSYS Fluent simulation of an impeller inside a reactor vessel. Image from a white paper by Xerox about scaling up CFD simulations. Read full article here.

Algorithmic Art

One might think that it’s a weekly struggle to find mesh-related fine art but honestly, works that fascinate me pass through my inbox or web browser with great regularity. The most recent example is the work of Owen Schuh who wrote this about his algorithmic-centered work: “These functions bear the structure of life, but operate in the parallel world of the mind: a world of simulacra inhabited by numbers and abstract relationships.” To me, this rings true about mesh generation: its function is to provide structure on which the simulation of a fluid (life) can be performed yet it remains something completely abstract.

Shown below, Unfolding a Cube (onto a plane) looks like many meshes I’ve seen before the optimization steps are applied. I recommend you read Schuh’s statements on the Art 3 Gallery website (see link above).