News & Software
- Altair is planning an IPO. [Exciting news for a cool company.]
- From Flow Science comes stress-reducing CFD practices. “Patience is a virtue, especially in the CFD world.”
- ENGYS released HELYX V3.0.0 with GUI, meshing, and adjoint solver improvements.
- EDEM 2018 was released for discrete element modeling.
- Here’s a blurb from the local paper about NASA Langley’s new computing center to be used for CFD and other computations. [Everyone’s seen Hidden Figures, right?]
Arizona State’s winning entry in the 2017 Simulating Reality Contest. Image from MSC Software. See link below.
News from Pointwise
- Pointwise Version 18.0 R4 was launched with the ability to dock a user’s Glyph scripts to a toolbar for 1-button access to automated macros and templates.
- Pointwise will be in Tokyo next week participating in the VINAS Users Conference. This annual event from our partner in Japan will feature a presentation by Dr. Rick Matus (Pointwise executive vice president) on alignment of our product development strategy with the NASA CFD 2030 Vision and a workshop by Ms. Carolyn Woeber (manager of technical support) on the latest advancements in our hybrid meshing technology.
- Join us in Daejeon, South Korea, on 16 October for Efficient Meshing With Pointwise, a workshop that will cover marine and aerospace applications of meshing as well geometry model preparation. This event is being facilitated by TAEYANG IT Co., Ltd., our partner in South Korea.
- On 4-5 December, we invite you to join us in Stuttgart, Germany for the Pointwise Meshing Technology Conference. This conference, held in partnership with CFD Beratung, our distributor in the regions, will delve deeply into the tools and techniques for structured and hybrid mesh generation, high-order meshing, geometry cleanup, and applied meshing for specific types of applications.
Applications
Lawrence Livermore National Lab used their expertise with the Cubit meshing software to develop p-fiber, an automated preprocessing tool, for Proctor & Gamble’s use in simulating the performance of paper products. Image from phys.org. [This is very cool.]
- CFD and meshing are mentioned in this brief introductory article about how parallel, multi-core computing is making FEA and CFD much faster. [I think it’s a bit Freudian that instead of “meshing” the article includes a tiny typo that reads “This messing [sic] and resulting solving of the Navier-Stokes equations…” Yes, meshing is a mess but you don’t have to keep rubbing it in.]
- CFD was used in the design of a Carrousel Rave tugboat. [In which I learned that a carrousel tug has a central ring that rotates around the boat’s superstructure. Seems kinda cool, but what do I know from boats?]
- CFD was used in the design of an underwater autonomous vehicle.
- Tecplot shares their approach to comparing different datasets on different grids in Tecplot 360.
Events
- OpenSource CFD for industry – high level development: Implementations with the OpenFOAM(R) Technology and C++ will be offered in 16-17 November in Gothenburg, Sweden. [I love the contrast between the concise (and brilliant) company name ABCfd and the less brief course name.]
- The agenda for next month’s Numeca International User Meeting has been published.
- The winners of MSC Software’s 2017 Simulating Reality Contest have been announced. [My favorite? Arizona State’s. See image above.]
- Recently announced, the Future CFD Technologies Workshop, to be held the weekend prior to SciTech 2018 in Orlando.
Interesting Stuff
- The OpenFOAM Foundation has announced the availability of fee-based maintenance plans to cover the €250,000 annual cost of bug fixing, testing, deploying, and improving the software. Four prioritized maintenance tiers are offered: Free; Bronze €1,000; Silver €5,000, and Gold, €20,000.
- Here’s an interesting opinion from Simxon [pronunciation unknown]: it’s time for all of us to standardize on ParaView for CFD post-processing. Their position seems to be based on two arguments. First, ParaView is open-source and free. Second, “The big vendors have yet to offer technology which enables a solution from one system to be displayable together with a solution from another system.” Their first point is obviously true. I cannot judge the factual accuracy of their second point and invite those of you who are more knowledgeable to weigh-in. Even if the second point turns out to be true (and I’m not saying it isn’t), are those two points sufficient for their standardization argument?
Triangulating and Triangulating and Triangulating and…
What do you get when you apply Triangulate (an online tool to “make triangle designs from photos”) on an image of a mesh? And what if you do it again? And again? I expect you to explore this and related questions for the rest of the day. I know that’s what I’ll be doing.
Screen shot of Triangulate in action. See link above.
Here’s my original image:
Here’s the first pass through Triangulate:
Here’s the second pass through Triangulate:
