Hardware

• The U.S. Congress is getting involved in exascale computing through the House’s passing of the American Super Computing Leadership Act by which the Dept. of Energy is tasked with advancing U.S. supercomputing via a number of methods including establishment of at least two gov’t-academia-industry partnerships. (Note: The Senate still needs to consider this act.)
• The future of simulation driven product development resides in the cloud says the CEO of Hi Tech CAE because of the high demand to be placed on computing resources.

CFD solution for an F-1 race car from the CFD is the Future website. See link below.

Software

• Version 0.3 of SpeedIT FLOW is now available. This RANS solver (appears to be based on OpenFOAM) runs entirely on the GPU.
• Rhino users can now generate NACA airfoils using the SeaHorse Foils plugin.
• Autodesk is currently testing Project Arro, a new tool for cleaning up CAD geometry so that it’s ready for simulation.

Preview of Autodesk’s Project Arro, specifically the stitch function for finding gaps in geometry. See link above.

Getting Started in Simulation

After reading How to Form an Engineering Simulation Plan by the president of CAE Associates in R&D Magazine I was like, “Dang, there goes one-third of my content for next Tuesday’s webinar.”

For those of you new to simulation (or CFD specifically), the article goes into detail on how to bring simulation into your organization. Here are the highlights [as paraphrased by me].

1. Start simple. Computing a time-dependent simulation of multiple moving bodies in reacting flow might not be the best “out of the box” test.
2. Know what you want from the simulation. “Color pictures” is a valid answer, just not a good one.
3. Stay narrowly focused on what you want to simulate.
4. Train everyone on the simulation tools. They are not black boxes.
5. Understand what your success criteria are.
6. Know the limitations of your design and the tools.
7. Validate, validate, validate. Can’t emphasize this enough. Running validation benchmarks is a great learning exercise and confidence builder.
8. Allocate the appropriate resources.
9. Be flexible.

If you’re still interested even after reading the article, join me and ENGINEERING.com’s Shawn Wasserman next Tuesday, 16 September, at 2:00 p.m. eastern for a wide-ranging conversation about why It’s a Wonderful Time To Be Using CFD.

Applications

• I’m hoping CFD contributed to the design of Cummins-Peterbilt “supertruck” and its 10.7 miles per gallon fuel usage.  Relative to less fuel efficient models, this vehicle would save around $27,000 per year in fuel costs and reduce emissions by over 40%.
• Validation of a Computationally Efficient CFD Model for Industrial Bubble Column Bioreactors (Registration required)
• Experimental Database with Baseline CFD Solutions: 2-D and Axisymmetric Hypersonic Shock-Wave/Turbulent Boundary Layer Interactions.
• Improving stormwater systems using FLOW-3D.

Meshing

• An improved orthogonal grid generation method for solving flows past highly cambered airfoils with and without roughness elements. (Registration and fee required.)
• LearnCAx wades into the mesh quality debate with the article “A good-looking mesh isn’t always the best.”

A good mesh sometimes looks not-so-good or so says LearnCAx. See link above.

Events & More

• The Engineering Simulation Show will be held 15-16 April in Derby, UK.
• MSC says they’ve reinvented CAE and are hosting webinars in early October to tell us how.
• The next HPC User Forum will be in Seattle on 15-17 September 2014.
• CFD is the future, true enough. But it’s also the website of researcher Ahmed Al Makky.

Abstractly Systematic

A valued reader (thank you) emailed me a link to the Systems Art blog and website, an online forum for exploring the use of systems theory for looking at extant works and creating new ones.

I bet you can appreciate how systems theory can be applied to certain types of geometric abstractions: Mondrian, for example.

Three excellent examples of Mondrian’s painting. Click image for source (a very nice article unto itself).

But I suppose the works of Jackson Pollock might challenge any systematic attempts at understanding. However, on the Systems Art blog you can read about “random regularity” and how his paintings (and those of others) can be interpreted.

Author Aldous Huxley once asked rhetorically how Pollock knew when he was done painting. Whether in response to Huxley or someone else, Pollock reportedly answered “How do you know when you’re done making love?”

Software

• Are you interested in trying CAD with “cloud, web, and mobile technologies?” Onshape, the new company from SolidWorks vets, is looking for testers.
• Friendship Systems released CAESES/Friendship Framework version 3.1 including support for adjoint CFD.
• Altair released HyperWorks 13.0 with updates to AcuSolve for CFD and HyperMesh for meshing.
• Automated Tet Mesh Generation for CFD Analysis of Aircraft in Conceptual Design

Meshing improvements are included in HyperWorks 13. See link above. Image from TenLinks.

Applications

• Here’s a video introduction into FloEFD embedded in PTC Creo.
• The Tesla Model S is more aerodynamic than a Chevy Volt [and other worthless headlines].
• A brief blurb on CFD for data center thermal modeling.
• Symscape’s September 2014 newsletter compiles several articles on resolving common geometry pitfalls for CFD.

Events

• The first UK FOAM/OpenFOAM User Day will be held on 20-21 November at the Bristol and Bath Science Park. [Wouldn't that make it User Days?]
• I had no idea there was a literature database for discrete element methods but there is and it has achieve the 5,000 user milestone.

Wonderful CFD Redux

• Just in case you missed it, the recording of The State of Simulation: It’s a Wonderful Time to Be Using CFD is now available online. (Registration required.)
• This article was linked to last week and referenced in the webinar and I’ll link to it again because it’s good for anyone who’s considering getting into CFD: How to Form an Engineering Simulation Plan.
• Along the same lines, if you’re new to CFD here’s a nice video that introduces CFD in the context of the BLOODHOUND supersonic car.
• Not mentioned during the webinar but definitely a welcome perspective is this article by CD-adapco’s Bill Clark on the third age of CFD.

News

CFD modeling of data centers. Image from Data Center Knowledge. See link above.

• What will $861 million of revenue get you? If you’re ANSYS, 105th place on Software Magazine’s annual Software 500 list of the world’s largest software companies. [If you're thinking what I'm thinking, the answer is no.]
• “We do not have a robust pipeline of young people with the right skills and training coming into the [aerospace] workforce,” said the head of aerospace’s main trade association. Perhaps not portraying new graduates as units being pumped out of a skill factory would be a good place to start fixing this. Just maybe.
• Oklahoma State University seeks to hire an assistant professor with a background in computational thermal/fluid sciences.

Halftime Tet Meshing

If I had seen this only a few years ago I would’ve suggested it to the band director at my boys’ high school.  Brief online research says this is a performance by the Carolina Crown drum corps at a Drum Corps International competition not too long ago. First found by me here.

What music do you think they were playing? A quar-tet perhaps?

Mesmerizing. I. Can’t. Look. Away.

Bonus points if you can guess what instrument I played in high school marching band. There are 3 correct answers so your odds are good.

Applications

• Argonne National Labs shares this video of a 50-million cell, high fidelity CFD simulation of a diesel engine. You can read more about it here.
• The Maritime Research Institute of the Netherlands has a new 4,000 core cluster on which customers can run their CFD code ReFRESCO.

This Ohio State Univ. designed car set a land speed record of slightly over 212 mph. Image from International Science Grid This Week. Click image for article.

Hardware

• How would you like to have 36 cores on your desktop? You can with the new Intel Xeon E5 v3 if you have two.
• The Call for Papers is open for Nvidia’s 6th GPU Technology Conference.
• What CAD/CAE/PLM providers made the list of the top 500 cloud apps? Autodesk was ranked highest at 120.
• If you like your CAD free and in the cloud, try the beta of Honeycomb3D. It’s designed for 3D printing.

Visualization

• Two nice collections of resources from Visualizing Data:
  • 273 data visualization resources
  • best of the visualization web for July 2014
• The ParaView User’s Guide is getting reworked for the 4.2 release.
• Tecplot RS 2014 R1 is now available for visualization of oil and gas reservoir simulations.

This oil saturation plot is an example of one new feature available in Tecplot RS 2014 R1. Image from Tecplot.

Things to Read

• Siemens PLM opens the discussion on CAD/CAE integration by saying it’s the key to effective simulation driven design, especially early in the design process. Do you agree? Watch for follow-up posts on this subject including the people, process, and technology issues. [This article is the first time I've ever encountered the word "centisecond."]
• It’s nice to see Prof. ZJ Wang blogging again about high order CFD.

Annoying Things

• The SolidSmack CAD blog surveyed CAD jockeys to find out what they find most annoying. It should not surprise anyone that the most annoying thing in CAD was “Getting 3D data from one CAD app to another.” You might be surprised by #2.
• The worldwide CFD market is forecast to grow at 12.85 percent by the year 2018. This is great news because it exceeds the projected growth rate of the entire simulation and analysis segment (7.5%) which in turn exceeds the overall PLM market (5%). [What's annoying is that the growth rate is presented to two decimal places which makes me automatically reject that number as contrived.]

Deals

• How good of a deal is an undergraduate engineering education? Of all majors surveyed, engineering has the best ROI at 21% versus an average return of about 15%.
• Boeing’s use of products from MSC Software will extend through four decades with the recent agreement to a 5-year extension of the licenses.
• FS Dynamics will be using CD-adapco‘s software for another 3 years according to a recently signed deal.

Let Your Problems Melt Away

We have each experienced times when we’re so frustrated with our work that we’d like to toss it all in the trash or burn it.

Artist Roger Hiorns has elevated such destruction to fine art by atomizing an entire jet engine. He started by melting the engine and spraying the resulting liquid through a nozzle where it mixed with water. This caused the liquid engine to condense into droplets that became a fine powder. Therefore, you can say that fluid dynamics was involved in the process.

The result, shown below, was a candidate for the Turner Prize in 2009.

It’s kind of a cross between those “Will it Blend” videos and those pictures of disassembled objects with all their components neatly arrayed.

Roger Hiorns’ atomized jet engine. Originally seen on Today and Tomorrow. Image from BBC News Magazine.

I’m certain that my friends at General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce, and the other engine manufacturers will enjoy this. In fact, this would be a good piece to install in the lobby of their corporate headquarters.

In Friday’s edition of This Week in CFD I linked to an article that discussed a report from Reportstack entitled Global Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Market 2014-2018 in which the market is forecast to grow at 12.85%. I wrote that I thought that number was contrived.

Upon reflection, that comment is unwarranted and I apologize for impuning the integrity of Reportstack. I have no reason not to believe their forecast. Please note that I’m doing this proactively – no one from Reportstack or anywhere else called me out. I identified my own mistake.

What I should’ve written was that quoting growth rates in a market forecast to two decimal places makes me think the authors don’t understand the concept of significant digits and are trying too hard to make their forecast appear rigorously analytic and believable. What’s wrong with just saying 12%?

Pointwise User Group Meeting 2014

The Pointwise User Group Meeting 2014 will soon be here – 29-30 October in Anaheim, California. To celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary the event is free – but you still have to register, please.

What’s in it for you?

• An OpenFOAM Master Class on Monday 27 October conducted by Applied CCM.
• A full day of seminars on the latest and greatest Pointwise capabilities including a preview of the new overset grid assembly feature suite and the special short course –  chosen by you – on advanced structured grid generation.
• A full day of presentations on applied CFD and meshing from experts around the globe.
• Previews of what the future holds for Pointwise mesh generation.

Won’t you join us? Register today.

And now, one long list.

• Learn more about EnSight with this slide deck from CEI China.
• Kitware champions open source in the context of a recent DoE report on high performance computing.
• FEA for All blogged about Midas NFX for simulation of structures and fluids and claims it’s the “first online FEA.” [Is this correct?]
• NAFEMS is conducting a survey on the use of computer based design analysis tools. You have until 31 October to participate.
• Motorsport team Prodrive has chosen Altair’s AcuSolve for their CFD simulations.
• ParaView 4.2 is now available and includes over 200 resolved issues.
• Is D-Wave‘s quantum computer the next big thing?

Computational simulation helped explain why there are so many spiral galaxies. Click image for article.

• NVIDIA is seeking presenters for their next GPU Technology Conference.
• More use of CFD for data center cooling.
• XYZ Scientific released TrueGrid version 3 for mesh generation.
• Beta CAE released ANSA v15.1.2 for mesh generation.
• Go from photo to mesh using Ransen’s PhotoToMesh.
• Congratulations to FYFD for having 200,000 followers on Tumblr. That doesn’t count all the other ways to follow the blog.
• NAFEMS announced the speakers list for their multiphysics conference.
• blueCAPE released blueCFD-AIR 1.04.

This mesh is from a profile of “CFD icon” David Gosman in HPC Today. Click image for article. Registration required.

• MSC Software announced MSC Apex, a “computational parts based CAE system.”
  • Monica Schnitger writes “pre/solve/post may be a thing of the past.”
  • Design World: “direct modeling and meshing engine may accelerate the CAD-to-mesh process by a factor up to 50X.”
  • DEVELOP3D: “inclined to agree” this is a major breakthrough.
• Stanford is hosting a symposium entitled “Mathematics, Computing & Design – Where Analysis and Creativity Combine” to celebrate Antony Jameson’s 80th birthday. [I simply wonder whether I'll be alive at age 80. To also be working at a high level like Jameson at that age would be too much to ask. Hell, to be that productive now would be a miracle for me.]
• For you visual learners, here’s a video about cubic Bezier curves.
• CFD will be used to study offshore C02 pipelines.
• Siemens PLM announced NX 10.
• Flow Science has made available the proceedings of their 2014 FLOW-3D Americas Users Conference. (Registration required.)

Screen capture of a video showing simulation of a car fire in a parking garage performed using FLOW-3D. Click image for video.

• Finland’s Alato University has an opening for a post doc or PhD student in fire simulation.
• Autodesk’s software is free (with an asterisk) for everyone in academia.
• Symscape shares information about Osborne Reynolds.
• The 4th International Conference on Turbulence and Interactions will be held 2-6 November 2015 in Corsica, France.
• For Tecplot users here are some Matlab to Tecplot conversion resources.
• Intelligent Light news:
  • FieldView 15 is coming in October. [Sorry no URL. This news from an ad in Aerospace America.]
  • There will be a webinar on analyzing the results of internal combustion engine simulations using FieldView on 28 October.
• Flow Science released FLOW-3D/MP v6.

Embroider a Mesh on Your Notebook

Etsy seller Fabulous Cat Papers is offering notebooks hand-embroidered with meshes (and other designs).  You’ll be the envy of the office or classroom with one of these.

A mesh embroidered on a notebook cover from Fabulous Cat Papers. As original seen on This is Colossal.

P.S. Please pardon the relative lack of posts in general and the rough formatting of this post in particular. It’s been a hella week, as the kids say.

NASA

• Happy 75th birthday to NASA Ames Research Center. Who’s going to the open house on Saturday?
• Stability and Control CFD Investigations of a Generic 53 deg. Swept UCAV Configuration, from NASA Langley Research Center.
• Aviation Week continues to cover CFD. In this case it’s CFD for aeroacoustics from NASA Langley. Be sure to watch this related video.

Various

• Read about what’s new in ACIS R25. “Geometric quality is a never-ending task.”
• From PTC/Creo comes best practices for overcoming CAD challenges and one of them is to simulate early and often.
• Wofram introduced Tweet-a-Program. If you tweet a Wolfram Language program to @WolframTaP it will reply with the answer. [I don't know their language well enough to do anything interesting, otherwise I'd show you an example.]
• FEA for All also makes the case for reducing design cost via simulation.
• And let’s take it back to the beginning with RGBSI’s What is CFD?
• 4RealSim is looking for an application engineering who would be “delighted to work on a daily base with FEA and/or CFD.”

From Plastics Today comes this article about resolving boundary layers for mold filling simulations with Moldex3D. Click image for article.

Computers and Computing

• Between mobile devices and the cloud you can argue that most everyone is walking around with a supercomputer in their hand. Because of that, two things become important in this age of pervasive supercomputing: a fundamental understanding of computational principles and sufficient network capacity.
• On a related topic, COMSOL provides an intro to parallel computing.
• Here are six myths of high performance computing: Part 1 and Part 2.
• Ribbonfarm manages to weave together a tale involving flow pacing (the manner of injecting chemicals during water treatment), software delivery (the “UX of time”), and an original piece of music in The Rhythms of Information. [And don't forget to listen to the music.]
• Autodesk plans to convert all customers to subscription licensing over the next couple of years. Two notable factoids from the article are 1) the subscription model gets all customers on the most recent versions as opposed to perpetual licensees who are several versions behind and 2) for their entry level products the subscription model represents a 30% increase in revenue over current licensing.
• “Ultimately, it is likely that much more engineering design and computation will occur in the cloud.” True?
• More news on the quantum computing front.
• DNS of Turbulent Flows with Parallel Algorithms for Various Computing Architectures

From a profile of CFD work at Mercury Marine. Image from Resolved Analytics. Click image for article.

Visualization

• Tecplot 360 EX 2014 Release 2 is now available.
• Intelligent Light news
  • The beta program for FieldView 15 will begin soon, giving you early access to features like an improved OpenFOAM reader and a new “open licensed” tool for viewing XDB files.
  • At the recent VINAS Users Conference in Japan, IL shared their thoughts on CFD postprocessing in the automotive industry. The slides are available for download at the link.
  • At the recent HPC User Forum, IL presented their work on cloud computing for tera-scale CFD.
  • IL added to VisIt the ability to write FieldView XDB files.
• Here’s the best of the visualization web for August 2014.
• CEI added new palette editing options to EnSight.

News From the International Meshing Roundtable

A poster illustrating CD-adapco’s winning entry for the IMR’s Meshing Contest. This year’s geometry was London’s Tower Bridge.

• Winner of the Meshing Maestro was CD-adapco with the entry shown above.
• Winner of the Meshing Contest (contest geometry = London’s Tower Bridge) was INRIA.
• Best technical paper was Sieger et al “Constrained Space Deformation for Design Optimization”
• Best technical poster was Ruiz-Girones et al “Optimizing mesh distortion by hierarchical iteration relocation of the nodes on the CAD entities”
• This year’s IMR Fellow is Paul-Louis George.
• Next year’s IMR will be in Austin, Texas. [Yee haw, just a couple hours drive south.]

Thanks to @zaidedan for live tweeting the event from which many of theses news items were gleaned.

Grab Bag

• ERCOFTAC announced short courses on multiphase flows to be held in Zurich in February.
• A huge library of Solid Edge CAD parts is available for use by students and professors at no cost.
• HyperWorks 13.0 Student Edition is available for free.
• Enhanced morphing is coming in STAR-CCM+ v9.06.
• sourceflux writes on the topic of OpenFOAM source code testing. [With a nice photo of a nuclear detonation from the U.S. Tumbler-Snapper tests from 1952.]
• GridPro 6.0 was released.
• There’s been an update of Autodesk’s free software from Project Memento for dealing with mesh data.
• There’s been an update of Autodesk’s free software from Project Ventus for rapid preprocessing of geometry for use in their Simulation CFD products.
• Symscape asks whether in CFD we’re actually solving the ENCPSS equations.
• For the newbie comes the book Beginning With Code_Aster.

A preview of enhanced morphing in STAR-CCM+ v9.06. See link above.

Hand Knitted Mesh

Artist Alyson Shotz was a recent guest on The Modern Art Notes podcast and I really need to find the time to listen to her episode, especially after being greeted by this image when visiting her website.

The home page of Alyson Shotz’ website.

The image above seems to be a computer model of her piece Untitled, 2013 made from hand-dyed yarn and pins on wall from an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

Alyson Shotz, Untitled, 2013

P.S. I feel compelled to apologize for the “hot mess” that his post is. Next week might not be any better and there will not be a post on Halloween because we’ll all be basking in post user group meeting glory and beginning a weekend celebration of Pointwise’s 20th anniversary.

All The News

• Want to learn about Bezier curves? Play the Bezier Game. [If you only click one link this week, make it this one.]
• CFD was used to investigate a dinosaur’s sense of smell by modeling the nasal cavity including turbinates.
• GrabCAD ignited a little debate with the article It’s Time to Get Over IGES. [You can read about how I feel in the comments.]
• From Dredging News Online [yes, there is such a thing] comes a bit about use of CFD to optimize a ball joint.
• Jobs
  • Did you know NAFEMS had an online CAE job website? Check out CAEJobSite.com.
  • General Motors in Warren, Michigan has a job opening for a Senior Vehicle Aerodynamics and Aeroacoustics CFD Engineer.
  • ESI-OpenFOAM are seeking OpenFOAM engineers, trainers and developers.
  • PhD-level CFD experts are needed in Houston.
  • CRAFT Tech is hiring CFD and CEM engineers.
• The October issue of DEVELOP3D magazine is now available for free download.
• MSC Software released SimManager 2014.
• TransMagic R11 was released.
• ESTECO released modeFRONTIER 2014.
• Chapoo demonstrated a new online 3D CAD viewer.
• From ONERA comes Cassiopee, CFD Advanced Set of Services In an Open Python Environment (i.e. CFD pre- and post-processing modules).
• Birds, wing tucks, and turbulence.
• Check out the finalists for the Information is Beautiful Awards.
• New blog: Meshes I Like
• From the same blogger comes a summary of the 23rd International Meshing Roundtable.
• Pump Action Pi?
• Free Money
  • The deadline for scholarship applications from the AIAA Foundation for students in aerospace-related fields is 31 Jan 2015.
  • NVIDIA will award one small company $100,000 if their idea is the best one for using GPU technology. This will happen at their 2015 GPU Technology Conference.
• CD-adapco’s STAR Global Conference 2015 and 35th Anniversary Celebration will be 16-18 March 2015 in San Diego.
• The 23rd Conference on Computational Mechanics (aka ACME-UK 2015) will be 8-10 April 2015 in Swansea, UK.
• Watch and interact with an octree demonstration.

Meshmixer 2.6 was released earlier this month and includes a feature for adding tubes to your 3D models so you can print a Stanford Bunny that shoots friggin’ laser beams water from its eyes. Image from Autodesk 123D blog. Click image for article.

Go Mesh Yourself

At first glance it’s not obvious what artist David Adey’s Hide is. From the closeup detail below you can definitely see triangular faceting.

David Adey, Hide (detail), 2013

When you take a step back and look at the work in its entirety you still probably won’t have a clear idea of what he’s done.

David Adey, Hide, 2013

This is a 3D laser scan of the artist’s body (75,000 triangular facets) that has been unwrapped, cut and flattened. You can read more about his intent and process here.

Sooner or later I’m going to have to delve deeper into this trend toward digitization and faceting in art and design.

No This Week Next Week

Everyone from Pointwise will in Anaheim, California next week for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2014 followed by a fun celebration of Pointwise’s 20th anniversary.

So next Friday morning when I’d normally be writing This Week in CFD I’ll be…

1. Exhausted
2. At Disneyland
3. Unthinking
4. All of the Above

This Week in CFD will return the following week along with other blog content.

Please keep in mind that next week our response times to your sales and support questions will be longer than usual due to decreased staffing levels. And next Friday our offices are closed.

Software

• Here’s this week’s “must click” link: WebGL-based fluid experiment. [Must have a "modern" browser and plenty of horsepower to enjoy the full experience.]
• Maybe our friends who know particle dynamics can validate whether mosh pits are more particulate or fluid.
• What is Caelus? [And how do you pronounce it? KAY-lus.] It’s a fork of OpenFOAM that’s been cleaned up, made easier to install, and supports Windows and Linux. [Full disclosure: The company behind Caelus includes a former Pointwise employee and the current Pointwise distributor for Australia.]
• CD-adapco released STAR-CCM+ v9.06 with a slew of new capabilities in performance, accuracy, and preprocessing.
• Richardson CFD (i.e. UFO-CFD) has a new website.
• Daat Research released Coolit v.14.
• Tech Soft 3D released HOOPS Exchange 2015 for 3D CAD data access.
• DEVELOP3D writes about the latest release of Magics 19 for working with faceted geometry (i.e. STL).
• CFD World wonders why OpenMDAO is open source.
• Fast Company is a bit passive-aggressive in their praise of Vim for text editing by labeling it an ’80s text editor. [Yes, I am trying to provoke a vi/Vim vs. Emacs debate.]

There’s a new release of PyFR, the open source Python framework. Image from pyfr.org. Click image for website.

Art

• Software is now able to determine a painting’s genre and influences 70% of the time.
• We would like to think that artist Janet Echelman uses high performance computing including CFD to design her “living breathing pieces that respond to the forces of nature – wind, water, and light.” (See image below.)

Janet Echelman, Line Drawing, 2006-2007. (Image from echelman.com. See link above.)

Events

• The proceedings of the 23rd International Meshing Roundtable are available online for free via Science Direct.
• You have only until 09 November to submit a design to be 3D printed for the i.materialise Holiday Gift Challenge.
• NAFEMS has begun a Benchmark Challenge Series beginning with one on stress in the center of a square plate. [Hopefully fluids challenges will come soon.]
• A workshop on Uncertainty Quantification in CFD will be held on 13 November in Delft.
• You have until 17 November to enter your simulation images in ANSYS’ 2015 Hall of Fame Competition.
• The proceedings from TFAWS 2014 (Thermal and Fluids Analysis Workshop) are available online. The 2015 event will be held in August at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Applications

• ESI’s CFD software was used as part of a fluid-structure interaction application for sun shades in Medina and Mecca.
• The Tame Aerodynamicist shares an introduction to the finite volume method.
• ANSYS shares a white paper on using CFD for simulating an exhaust gas recirculation cooler.
• Stanford University students are using Pointwise, SU2, and Tecplot 360 EX to help design their solar car.
• I seem to recall promising never to post an image of splashed paint again but… what would it look like if you put a Ferrari in a wind tunnel and sprayed it with UV paint? The image below and the ones at the link seem to be a mashup of the best-of and worst-of CFD visualizations.

Fabien Oefner, Ferrari California T. Image from PetaPixel. See link above.

People

• Exa seeks to hire a Senior Software Engineer – CFD Software Development.
• Congratulations to Keith Martin who’s graduating as a Fellow of the Hydro Research Foundation and did CFD research.

Hardware

• I am not a hardware guy, but some people think Soft Machine’s Variable Instruction Set Computing (VISC) could offer great performance improvements.
• NASA’s CFD benchmarks, the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, are used to test the performance of various chipsets.
• Because the Call for Papers deadline has already past all we can do now is wait to read the special issue of Computers and Electrical Engineering on Optimization of Parallel Scientific Applications with Accelerated HPC.
• You can read a little about XFLOW CFD on Rescale’s cloud-based HPC systems.

Congratulations to CEI for the use of EnSight to create the cover image of Nature magazine. Click image for article.

Sculpting via 3D Printing

Artist Moto Waganari wants to create something tangible yet virtual, something solid yet transparent, something that couldn’t be made by hand. His 3D printed sculptures of wireframe humans and other objects are the result. Check out the link for more images and a video.

Moto Waganari, 3D printed sculpture. Image from Visual News.

This reminds me that we at Pointwise need to finalize and release the 3D printing plugin that lets you print your mesh.

As I’ve mentioned before, my favorite issue of AIAA’s Aerospace America magazine is the annual Year in Review issue. It is, in fact, the only issue I keep and have every one of them since 1980, the year I joined AIAA as an undergrad at Syracuse University.

The issue consists of articles written by each of AIAA’s technical committees summarizing noteworthy accomplishments from the previous year. I like to read them all and see where CFD or things closely related to CFD are mentioned.

So here’s where I found CFD in the 2014 Year in Review.

Multidisciplinary Design Optimization

NASA’s OpenMDAO and the University of Michigan’s MDOlab collaborated on a satellite design optimization benchmark. In a journal article on their work you see an illustration of the satellite orbiting part of the Pointwise logo the earth.

Image from the U. Michigan paper cited above.

Non-Deterministic Approaches

While there is nothing about CFD in their article (seems to be mostly about materials and manufacturing), I’m wondering whether they can contribute to the goal of quantifying uncertainty in CFD analysis as called for by the CFD 2030 Vision Study. “it has become increasingly important to quantify the uncertainties within these models and the impact they have on the accuracy of the models’ predictions.”

Spacecraft Structures

False alarm. the “fixed-mesh” reflector is actually a weight-saving antenna/dish design.

Applied Aerodynamics

The first sonic boom prediction workshop was held at SciTech 2014 in order to assess the state of the art in this particular area. Grid refinement and alignment techniques were of particular interest.

The DoD’s CREATE-AV program released Kestrel 5.0 (for fixed-wing aircraft) and Helios 5.0 (for rotorcraft).

AFRL and Lockheed Martin began a collaborative CFD study of aircraft distributed propulsion systems (i.e. 30 inlets and nozzles).

Fluid Dynamics

Advances in numerical methods led to a new volume of fluid approach for simulating fuel spray atomization for fuel injectors in gas turbine engines.

In the area of LES computation of turbulent flows, a new wall model has been used to predict both attached and separated high Reynolds number flow.

Ground Testing

NASA completed testing of Rotating Wake Improvement on the Advanced Noise Control Fan rig for the purpose of providing data for validation of computational aeroacoustic simulations.

Meshing, Visualization and Computational Environments

Advances cited in the field of mesh generation include strand meshing (Utah State, NASA, Army), integrated meshing and overset grid assembly (Pointwise), various improvements to CREATE’s Capstone.

In the area of visualization, FieldView evolved to better handle large datasets, Intelligent Light worked with VisIt, and Tecplot’s Chorus addressed the simultaneous visualization of multiple datasets.

AEDC continued their work on a computational environment for multidisciplinary simulations.

The MVCE technical committee is very committed to the aspects of the CFD Vision 2030 study that are within its sphere of influence. Accordingly, a panel discussion on this topic will be held at SciTech 2015.

Aerodynamic Decelerator Systems

NASA’s arc jet testing of ADEPT, a semi-rigid aeroshell entry system, showed excellent comparison with pre-test CFD.

History

If you’ve ever wondered what to do with your potentially valuable documents and artifacts, don’t leave them for your heirs to sort out and avoid the temptation to do it yourself. A trained archivist should look them over with you.

[Whose documents from the CFD world would you like to see?]

Legal Aspects

A sigh of relief as CFD isn’t mentioned here.

Management

3-D printing is cited here as an affordable method for manufacturing with challenges in the areas of cost, time, and material properties that have to be addressed to determine how the technology can be best applied.

Computer Systems

Alas, the works cited here pertain to devices flown in aircraft and spacecraft, not number crunchers like we need in CFD. Although, I wonder if the latter are within this committee’s charter?

Intelligent Systems

Researchers From U. of Michigan, Iowa State, and Stanford are developing more accurate turbulence models with information derived from “big data” (higher fidelity simulations).

Hypersonic Technologies and Aerospace Planes

Better turbulence modeling has been cited as critical need for more accurate simulation of shock wave interaction with boundary layers in hypersonic flows.

High-Speed Air Breathing Propulsion

NASA’s Vulcan-CFD package now supports vibrational non-equilibrium and subgrid scale models.

Propellants and Combustion 

AFOSR’s efforts to collect experimental data on turbulent combustion at conditions normally encountered in aerospace systems will provide a great resource for validating and expanding the use of simulation for engine development.

Closing Thoughts

If you saw any CFD references that I missed, please cite them in the comment section below.

Based on 34 years of reading AIAA’s Year in Review issue, CFD is explicitly cited less and less. I actually think this is a good thing. Before, use of CFD was noteworthy because it was new, exotic, and cool. Now, it’s just another tool.

The lack of URLs to the works cited was extremely frustrating. Paradoxically, as much as I prefer reading paper magazines and books, I really want to have links to additional online content.

Each year I marvel at the breadth and depth of high-quality and exciting work being done in the aerospace industry. I recommend AIAA membership and, almost more importantly, active participation on a technical committee as your opportunity to help advance the field.

Please enjoy this first post of 2015.

Everyone Else’s News

• CD-adapco added a new video to their YouTube channel: Convergent Divergent Nozzle Tutorial.
• I only recently discovered NASA Langley’s turbulence modeling resource page where they consolidate info on all RANS turbulence models.
• Simpleware 7.0 was released and includes boundary layer meshing and ABAQUS CFD export among other features.
• PyFR v0.2.4 was released.

Pointwise’s News

• Dr. Steve Karman, formerly of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga SimCenter, has joined Pointwise’s applied research team.
• You can meet Steve in his new capacity along with several others of us at AIAA SciTech next week in Orlando.
• Pointwise is looking to add other folks to our team. We have job openings for an Applications Engineer and two engineering interns for the summer.

Another Fine Mesh News

The fine folks at WordPress sent me an email with some stats about this blog’s performance during 2014. I thought I’d share them with you.

• AFM had about 110,000 views during 2014.
• The blog has over 1,400 email subscribers and an uncounted number of RSS and other followers.
• The most viewed posts during 2014 were:
  • Accuracy, Convergence, and Mesh Quality – posted in July 2012 [very happy about the staying power of this post]
  • Navier Stokes Equations Solved? – posted in January 2014
  • There’s More to CFD Convergence Than Reading the Manual – posted in April 2011 [surprised that this post continues to be read]
  • Would You Care for Some CFD with That Pi? – posted in March 2014
  • Why Cartesian Grids Are Good – posted in September 2012
• Readers are finding AFM via Twitter, pointwise.com, LinkedIn, CFD Online, and Facebook in that order of popularity. [hooray Twitter]
• Most readers came from the USA, UK, and Germany.

Let’s hope we can continue to deliver content that you find educating and entertaining [edutaining?] in 2015.

Faceted Drawing

Mark Nagtzaam graphite drawings are a bit of a paradox: “Filling in all the negative fields in his drawings with graphite himself, the works are saturated, to the point of hyperbole, with time. For all their seductive systematic severity, they abundantly testify to a human presence, paradoxically conveying that despite the artist’s methodically engineered absence, he was nevertheless there, doing, as it were, his due diligence, he was there, drawing.”

Mark Nagtzaam, Black Kawasaki, 2013

Greetings from snowy and icy Fort Worth, Texas.

Software

• Teplot Chorus 2015 Release 1 was launched and offers order of magnitude reductions in processing time due to incorporation of the company’s SZL technology.
• CD-adapco launched STAR-CCM+ v10.02, a major new release including enhanced interaction with CAD, an improved results viewer, and mesh refinement for wakes.
• DHCAE Tools launched the CastNet v4 GUI framework for OpenFOAM.
• ANSYS Fluent 16.0 and FieldView are now compatible at the HPC parallel level.

Events

• The 15th International Workshop on the Physics of Compressible Turbulent Mixing will be held on 10-15 July 2016 in Sydney, Australia.
• Dassault Systemes announced the keynote speaker for their 2015 SIMULIA Community Conference.

News

• Mentor Graphics is accepting nominations until 30 April 2015 for the first Don Miller Award for Excellence in System Level Thermo-Fluid Design.
• Our friends at ANSYS continue to exhibit strong financial performance, reporting FY 2014 revenue of $936 million, a 10% year-over-year growth.

Meshing

The new overset Examine diagnostic in Pointwise shows fringe/donor volume ratio in this example of an aircraft wing. See link below.

• Pointwise released Pointwise V17.3 which includes integration with overset grid assembly.
• CFX Berlin released TwinMesh 2015 for structured grid generation for rotating machines [if I translated from German correctly].
• Strong Simulation Consulting shares tips on getting better prism layers from Fluent meshing.
• CFD Associates offers tips on meshing small gaps.
• ANSYS shares videos on various meshing strategies.

Applications

• TimkenSteel is using ANSYS’ CFD software to simulate heat treating.
• CFD was used to aid the design of an airship.
• Autodesk Labs released an update (freely available) to Project Memento, their toolset for manipulating meshes for digital fabrication.

The Cloud

• OnShape’s Jon Hirschtick continues to get a lot of press [deservedly so] as the company continues to talk more and more about their new approach to cloud-based CAD which promises no installs, no downloads, use on any device, and ease of use. From this article I infer that “ease of use” refers to installation, license management, and maintenance of the software, not necessarily how easy it is to make the software do things. Which is enlightening because I don’t see any reason why cloud-based software should necessarily be any easier to use than desktop software. Part 2 of the article is here.
• Has anyone tried MyCadbox for online viewing of your CAD models? It’s currently in beta with 7 days of free use.
• And for simulation in the cloud there’s SimForDesign.

Computing

• Computers need not be all about integrated circuits. In what might be an interesting parallel for CFD, some day you might be using a fluidic computer with bubble logic. Or what about ternary instead of binary logic? Read more about unconventional computing concepts.
• But if you prefer your computers to be all electrical, consider a future in which transistors are made from single-atom-thick layer of silicene. [From our friends at the Univ. of Texas.]
• Here’s a video on how the European DEEP-ER project is working toward exascale computing.

Meshing Has Always Been a Bridge

Londoners may soon experience a highly faceted structure if the entries in the Nine Elms to Pimlico Bridge Competition are any indication. I realize that many bridge structures have certain faceted aspects, but some of these designs including the ones illustrated below are truly mesh-like. Click through to the gallery to see all the entries.

Bonus: Computer simulations prove the optimal length of eyelashes (to keep dirt out of the eye) is one-third the width of the eye.

A couple of weeks ago in advance of the Academy Awards TV broadcast we had some fun on Twitter by tweaking movie titles to give them a CFD theme and then tweeting them with the hashtag #CFDmovies.

Before they all get lost to the ether, here they are – sorted alphabetically and without attribution. To everyone who played along – and there were many of you – thanks.

• 12 Angry Users
• 12 Years a Grad Student
• 39 Backward Facing Steps
• 50 First Order Approximations
• 500 Days of Summer Compute Time
• A Beautiful Mesh
• A DNS is Forever
• A Fistful of DNS
• A Histogram of Violence
• A SIMPLE Plan
• A View to a Kill Job
• All Quiet on the Advancing Front
• An Outsourcing to India
• Big Hero HEX
• Big Trouble in Little Skewed Cells
• Boris Gudonov Solver
• Burn After Reading the Solver Documentation
• Cloud Computing Atlas
• Converged in 60 Seconds
• Convergent
• Das Reboot
• Death of a Software Salesman
• Despicable Mesh
• Divergence Now
• E.T. – The Equations of Turbulence
• Fluids Rush In
• For a Few Iterations More
• For Whom the Pay-as-You-Go License Tolls
• Forrest GRUMMP
• Frank White and the One Seventh Power Boundary Layer
• Gone with the Upwind
• Grid Lola Grid
• Hang ‘Em High Order Solution
• Honey, I Shrunk the Grids
• How To Train Your User
• Hustle and Flow Simulation
• Jacobian The Liar
• Jacobian’s Ladder
• Jonah Hex
• King van Leer
• M is for Modeling
• Magnetohydrodynamic Force
• Mesh Independence Day
• Mesher Without a Hex
• Meshing the Impossible
• Meshless Love
• Miracle on Von Karman Vortex Street
• No Convergence for Old Men
• Of Mice and Menus
• Princess Monotonic
• Pulp Skin Friction
• Solution is About To Converge
• Some Like it High Order
• The Design Lead Who Knew Too Much
• The French Interblock Connection
• The Good, The Bad, and The Inaccurate
• The HEX BLOCK Movie
• The Identity Matrix
• The K-Omega Man
• The Matrix – Renumbered
• The Mesh-ix
• The Silence of the Lambda Shock
• The Solution That Wasn’t There
• The Wizard of AUSM
• There’s No Business Like Flow Business
• To Converge or Converge Not
• To Kill a Matrix Multiply
• Trading Laplace’s
• Twelve Mesh Monkeys
• Under-Relaxation: Rise of The LES
• V for Validation
• Waiting for Gudonov

Claudio Pita, Senior Engineer on the Technical Support Team.

One of my favorite series on Lifehacker is called How I Work. In this series, the team interviews people from around the world to learn about the tools and techniques they use to get through the day. We decided to try something similar with the Pointwise staff and over the next year will share with you how we work.

Let’s kick off this series with Dr. Claudio Pita. Claudio joined Pointwise as a senior engineer on the Applied Research Team in September 2010 after completing a year-long term as Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. In 2013, he joined the Technical Support Team. Dr. Pita earned a B.S. and an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the Instituto Balseiro in Argentina and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Mississippi State University. His Ph.D. research involved “Modeling of oxide bifilms in aluminum castings using the Immersed Element-Free Galerkin Method.”

• Location: Fort Worth, TX
• Current position: Senior Engineer – Technical Support Team
• Current computer: Windows 7, Intel Xeon CPU W3505 2.53GHz, 24GB RAM
• One word that best describes how you work: Focused

What software or tools do you use every day?

As a part of the Technical Support team, I use a variety of tools to ensure our customers receive unmatched support. With that in mind, I use Pointwise and Gridgen every day. Not only am I using these tools to field support requests, but also to generate grids for workshops and conferences.

Our customers can contact us in a number of different ways. These days most requests arrive via email, so I use Outlook as an email client. On my Windows machine Outlook and our CRM software, Sage, can talk seamlessly making it easy to keep track of feature requests, bugs, and general communications.

One of the areas we are all responsible for on the Technical Support team is documentation. When a new feature is released or a bug is fixed, it must be documented. I use Corel PaintShop Pro and FrameMaker to help create our PDF documents shipped with every copy of our software.

What are you currently working on?

Support is my first priority, so I’m first and foremost fielding customer requests. All of our customers are working on different applications, so the work is varied. In the morning I may be helping a customer mesh the wing tip of an aircraft and by the afternoon I’m meshing the passage of a pump. Also, because our software can be automated, I actively develop Glyph scripts for either complete applications or to automate tedious tasks.

As far as specific projects I’m currently working on, one is a grid for the DrivAer geometry. The grid is a viscous hybrid grid and we are working with a partner to perform shape optimization to improve the baseline model’s performance. We will be presenting this work at the upcoming 10^th OpenFOAM Workshop. I’m also participating in the Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop hosted by AIAA by generating grids for their test cases.

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

Having worked in Pointwise’s Applied Research team prior to transferring to Technical Support, I did a lot of development work. Therefore, it was relatively easy to get started with Glyph scripting. Not a lot of people know how powerful Glyph can be. I like to help our customers realize the power of Glyph by writing scripts to either automate their entire meshing process or save them time by writing utility scripts. My editor of choice would have to be Emacs.

Do you have any Glyph scripting tips?

I would like to encourage customers who are thinking about writing their first Glyph script to review the Glyph resources that Pointwise has available. These materials will help them get over the learning curve and ahead of the game quickly and efficiently. Here is a list of the available resources:

• Glyph Scripting Introductory Video

Here we present a basic introduction to scripting in Pointwise and lay the framework for customization of the meshing process through scripts. Scripting in Pointwise is accomplished with Glyph, an extension of Tcl. You can find this video here: http://www.pointwise.com/videos/Intro-to-Scripting/

• Glyph Reference Manual

This manual is very useful and will teach you the best practices to be implemented in your own Glyph script. You can find this document in Help, Glyph Reference Manual.

• Glyph Manual Pages

This manual presents a description of every Glyph function we support. Please note that you can find a particular function either by name (About, Functions) or by type by expanding the appropriate Glyph type (e.g. pw::Layer in General Types). This manual is located in Help, Glyph Manual Pages.

• Re-Entry Vehicle Tutorial

Even if this particular tutorial does not work a problem similar to yours (3-D unstructured volume meshing around the wing), it is a very useful resource that will teach you basic Glyph programming logic before you start writing your own script. This tutorial will also show you the “best Glyph practices” presented in the Glyph Reference Manual in an actual script. You can find this tutorial in Help, Tutorial Workbook (the last tutorial).

• GitHub

Pointwise has a library of Glyph scripts available on GitHub (a web-based version of the Git revision control system). Here you will find a wide variety of very useful Glyph scripts that you can use as templates or for reference.

• Glyph Training Courses

You are more than welcome to attend one of our Glyph scripting training courses. Please note that our courses are free of charge to current customers (you would only have to travel to our offices in Fort Worth, TX). You can find the schedule for the upcoming classes here: http://www.pointwise.com/support/train.shtml.

• Technical Support

Always keep in mind that you can contact us at support@pointwise.com if you need some help to resolve any issues you may encounter either with a Glyph script or a mesh generation project.

What project are you most proud of and why?

The grid I generated for the Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop. This case gave me an opportunity to work on a complete mesh that will be used to run some very interesting CFD simulations, hopefully to be presented at the workshop and compared with experimental data.

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

Working at a grid generation company doesn’t leave me with too much time to run complete CFD simulations. That being said, I do get to use a variety of solvers to test any issues that are reported by our customers. When I have to postprocess data or look at our grids and solutions simultaneously, I’ll resort to using either Tecplot or ParaView.

Are you reading any interesting technical papers we should know about?

Since I’m working on assembling a grid for the DrivAer model proposed by the Institute of Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics at the Technische Universität München, I’ve been reading Experimental and Numerical Investigation of the DrivAer Model by Angelina Heft.

Do you plan on attending any conferences or workshops this year?

I will bring the work I’ve been doing with the DrivAer model to the 10^th OpenFOAM Workshop to be held this summer in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Tell us about what you do when you’re not generating meshes?

When I’m not generating grids I’m taking care of my kids. Beyond that, it’s church, exercise, and woodworking in that order.

If you had to pick a place to have dinner, where would you go?

In Fort Worth, Texas de Brazil. Moving south, in Houston, Tango & Malbec. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, my home country, I’d pick Los Inmortales. I like a good slow cooked well done steak…not burned…slow cooked.

Software

• AeroDynamic Solutions released ADS 6.5, their turbomachinery CFD software suite including a native interface from Pointwise to Code Leo.
• Also in the field of turbo CFD, ADT released TURBOdesign Suite 5.2.5.
• CFD Engine has a new blog called Head in the Clouds and a refocused mission: “a CFD consultancy with its own cloud platform.”
• On SolidSmack you can read interviews with the CEOs of Onshape and Autodesk on CAD in the cloud.
• You still have until 15 April to submit a full paper for possible publication in the Open Engineering topical issue on CFD for engineering design.

Applications

Streamlines colored by velocity magnitude near the proximal arterial inlet computed using STAR-CCM+. Image from AIP Physics of Fluids and authors F. Iori et al. Click image for full paper.

• DNV GL is using CFD to study the effect of hull fouling (marine creatures attaching themselves to ship hulls) on a ship’s increased drag and reduced fuel efficiency.
• CFD is being used to study to simulate an explosion‘s effect on an urban environment so that insurance carriers can better understand the risks involved.
• Air Products uses CFD in a consulting role to help plastics manufacturers design efficient systems (e.g. combustible dust inerting).

Events

Screen capture from a video illustrating a simulation of a blown wing performed by Joby Aviation using STAR-CCM+. Click image for video.

• CD-adapco celebrated its 35th anniversary this week at their STAR Global Conference.
  • STAR-CCM+ v10.02 was officially released.
  • The company now has 850 employees and annual revenue approaching $200 million.
  • A new aero-vibro-acoustic simulation tool, Wave6, was announced as described in this Desktop Engineering summary of the entire conference.
• Mentor Graphics was awarded LED Magazine’s Sapphire Award for FloEFD and other tools that make up an “excellent complete temperature analysis and simulation system.”
• The first CFD Impact Conference will be held at Technion in Haifa, Israel on 30 June 2015. The keynote speaker will be Prof. Peter Vincent who talk about the PyFR open source CFD solver, among other topics.

Bid on Programming History

We’ve all heard it said that programming is an art form so the Algorithm Auction should come as no surprise. Via Artsy.net you can read about the first auction celebrating the art of code. Bidding closes on 27 March so you still have time to bid on works such as Brian Kernighan’s hand written and signed Hello World program (see image below). Current bid is $2,250.

Brian Kernighan, Hello World, ink on dot matrix paper. Image from Artsy.net. Click image for site.

How much would you pay for hand written portions of Pointwise’s source code signed by Dr. John Steinbrenner?

Events

• The agenda for next month’s COFES (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software) has been announced and includes 2.5 hours dedicated to reviewing and moving forward with the issues identified during January’s Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Summit (ASSESS).
• Altair announced the keynote speakers for the 2015 Americas Altair Technology Conference.
• The International Conference on Fan Noise, Technology, and Numerical Methods will be held 15-17 April 2015 in Lyon, France.

Come for the cool images. Stay to learn about random dense packings. Image copyright (c) 2006 pack-any-shape.com. Click image for website.

Software

• simFlow announced RapidCFD: OpenFOAM running on the GPU.
• MSC Software announced the “Cheetah” release of MSC Apex, their next-generation CAE platform. This release includes, among other things, improvements to geometry modeling and meshing on which “55% of engineers spend more than 40% of their time.” [That has to be an FEA-centric view because I bet if you asked CFDers the percentage would be more like 75% of their time.]
• Autodesk has made Project Harmony, an automatic mesher for Moldflow, freely available through Autodesk Labs.
• Pixar’s RenderMan is now freely available for non-commercial use. [I know, not really CFD. Just really interesting.]
• Creative Fields offers cfSuite, a GUI environment for OpenFOAM.
• Does it make sense to run CAD on mobile devices? This free report from Lifecycle Insights delves into this issue. [This is of interest to me because we’ve put Pointwise on a Windows tablet.]
• CFD Support launched a suite of Paraview plugins for turbomachinery, Turbo Blade Post.
• MixIT is Tridiagonal’s new analysis software for stirred tanks.

Applications

SABIC’s CFD-designed and 3D-printed roof reduces drag. Image from pddnet.com. See link below.

• SABIC used CFD to help design and 3D printing to help manufacturer a prototype roof that reduces vehicle drag by 6%, and important step toward meeting emission standards to be set in mid-2016.
• Peterbilt used CFD to achieve 14% fuel efficiency improvements on one of their latest truck models.
• Comparison of CFD-Based Simulation of External Fuel Tank Separation to Flight Test, co-authored by Pointwise’s John Dreese. [available for purchase from AIAA]
• Improving air disperser performance with CFD.
• CFD was used to gain insight into vortex-induced motion of oil rigs and other offshore floating structures.
• Velocite, CFD, and design of the latest model of Syn aero road bike.
• CFD for design of air intake and exhaust systems for wind farm service vessels.
• By using CFD to understand the airflow in S-ducts, researchers at Virginia Tech have 3D printed the StreamVane, a distortion reducer tailored to the flowfield. [Propulsion CFD is where I started my career so I have a fondness for this type of stuff. I remember examining CFD results for compressor face distortion for the F-16’s inlet duct.]

Researchers at Virginia Tech are using CFD to study airflow distortion in serpentine ducts. Image from Aerospace America. See link above.

Anything But Blithe

Part photographer, part painter, artist Birgit Blyth has mastered the photographic technique called chromoskedasic painting. Drawing an analogy with painter Morris Louis, Blyth brings process and content together in a unique way. Like painter Callum Innes, Blyth evolves the grid motif into something quite organic and sensual. And unlike a grid generator for CFD, the analog process seems to be winning the battle over the digital design.

Birgit Blyth, Grid No. 1, 2014

Bonus: As submitted by an alert reader, geometric animal street art.

How many times have you seen something on the internet that you’ve wanted to try for yourself? [Warning. Do not try this at home. Professional stunt driver on closed course. May result in the medical condition known as “hot dog fingers.”] For me, it was a post by Jason Davies called From Random Polygon to Ellipse.

Jason created an online applet that demonstrates an interesting mathematical phenomenon. If you start with a polygon defined by a random collection of points and then iteratively create a new polygon from the midpoints of each of the original polygon’s segments, the perimeter shape converges to an ellipse.

Jason ran across this in Davis and Hersh’s The Mathematical Experience in which the authors showed that not only is this transformation provable but that the resulting ellipse is tilted 45 degrees.

The “why” remains a mystery to me. But I had to try the “how” for myself and wrote a script for Pointwise using our Tcl-based Glyph scripting language that does the following.

1. Select any domain (surface mesh).
2. Create a database curve (geometry) that represents the domain’s perimeter by simply connecting all its grid points.
3. Apply Jason’s mid-point replacement technique to make a new perimeter.
4. Iteratively repeat.

Sure enough, the perimeter curves become ellipses regardless of how complicated the original perimeter’s shape is. You can see some examples in this video on YouTube.

Screenshot of the dom2Ellipse script running in Pointwise. Illustrates the conversion of an arbitrary polygon to an ellipse. Click image for video.

The graphics in the video show the last 88 iterations on the perimeter with the most recent one being white and the 88th being black. So initially you see the first 88 perimeters accumulating and then see them slowly converge to the final ellipse.

Also note that the perimeter at each iteration is scaled up by the relative size of its bounding box to the original bounding box’s perimeter. Otherwise, the perimeters would shrink to nothing.

What was really fun to see was that if the original perimeter is truly 3D, the final perimeter is a planar ellipse, as shown in the video above at the 2:25 mark.

The domain2Ellipse.glf script is available for you to download from the Glyph Script Exchange hosted at GitHub so you can try it for yourself in Pointwise.

And hopefully one of you can read the mathematics and describe in layman’s terms what’s going on here.

Special thanks to:

• Jason Davies for posting his original work online.
• Pat Baker for improving my script for publication.
• Travis Carrigan for making the video.

Heather McCoy, Manager of our Sales and Marketing Programs.

I hate to disappoint you but I never do any meshing. The title of this piece should really be, “I’m Heather and This Is How I Help You Mesh.”

I have a degree from Trinity University in San Antonio and spent several years in various office administrator jobs in Fort Worth. I came to Pointwise in the summer of 1998 as a temporary administrative assistant. Pointwise was looking for someone to answer the phone and clean up its customer files and I needed a part-time job. I ended up spending more and more time at the office finding more projects to tackle. They finally gave up and hired me full time in January of 1999.

• Location: Fort Worth
• Current position: Manager, Sales and Marketing Programs
• Current computer: Dell XPS 8500 Windows 7
• One word that best describes how you work: Purposely

What software or tools do you use every day?

Sage CRM and MS Outlook for interacting with our customers. I generate sales quotations and invoices with QuickBooks. And, I use Asana for managing our marketing and distribution projects.

What does your workspace look like?

Heather’s current workspace.

I am lucky enough to have an office with a window and great big desk with plenty of room for my two computer monitors and my project files. My desk has been with me since I came to work at Pointwise 16 years ago. I also have two comfy chairs that came from my grandmother’s house. They are not pretty but I find that people will sometimes come in my office to visit just to sit in the chairs.

What are you currently working on?

I am working on a mix of things right now. I am overseeing a series of projects that will streamline some of our customer relationship management tasks. Most of these projects are invisible to our customers but they help make us more organized and efficient. I am also coordinating our 2015 Pointwise Distributors’ Meeting and all the activities surrounding it. And I am working on a customer insight project for our marketing team.

What would you say is your specialty at Pointwise?

One of the things I like to do is make Pointwise better at serving its customers and distributors. But I also want to make it easier on my colleagues to do their job effectively without hurting the timeliness or quality of the services we provide. I am always looking for ways to make everyone’s life a little easier. I am lucky to have been at Pointwise long enough that I know a little bit about a lot of things so I can see the big picture and connect the dots between customers, sales, marketing, support, and distribution.

Any tips, tricks, or advice for our users?

Participate in one of Pointwise’s training classes in our Fort Worth office, attend a Let’s Talking Meshing Workshop, or attend the Pointwise User Group Meeting in 2016. The training at these events will give you that edge you need to efficiently and effectively use Pointwise. Not only will you learn a few tips and tricks along the way, but we also get to meet you and you will experience some of our great Texas hospitality.

What project are you most proud of and why?

This is a tough one. I think the project that I am the most proud of and has had the broadest reach and the most impact was organizing the first Gridgen User Group Meeting in 2004. Before that, Pointwise had hosted small, brief Gridgen user gatherings at industry conferences. However, we had never hosted a multi-day event focusing on Gridgen and meshing topics in our hometown of Fort Worth. I had been to other CFD software user group meetings and had hosted a couple of successful Pointwise Distributor Meetings. I knew we could do it. So, I went to the Pointwise owners told them that it was time to try hosting our own user group meeting. They agreed and 11 years later, we are still hosting regular user group meetings. We changed the name in 2008 to the Pointwise User Group Meeting.

Have you recently read any books or articles we should know about?

There are two books I recently finished that are worth reading. Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken is excellent and has some great World War II aviation history. Working at Pointwise has given me an appreciation for the history of aerospace and I loved reading about what it was like to fly during the war in the Pacific arena. I also recently read, Red Hope, written by John Dreese, my colleague and a senior engineer on Pointwise’s Technical Support Team. Not only is it a compelling story but I actually understood some of the subtle engineering humor.

Do you plan on attending any conferences or workshops this year?

Since the AIAA Aviation conference is in Dallas this year, I will be there helping out with the Let’s Talk Meshing Workshop we are hosting on Sunday, 21 June. I will also be at the VINAS User Conference in October and at the European Let’s Talk Meshing Workshop we are hosting in November in Stuttgart, Germany.

What do you do when you’re not surrounded by engineers making meshes?

I love to work out. I mainly run, swim and do Pilates. Right now I am training to run the Oklahoma City Memorial Half Marathon on April 26. (You should join me. This run commemorates the Oklahoma City bombing that happened 20 years ago this month.) Running gets me outside in the fresh air and helps me decompress. Plus, I enjoy eating. I really need to run to counterbalance all the eating I do.

What is some of the best advice you’ve received?

My father was the Manager of Administrative Services at the Oklahoma City Zoo for many years and while I don’t remember any specific advice he gave me, he instilled in me the importance of hard work, being dependable and always, always providing a good customer experience no matter what.

If you had to pick a place to have dinner, where would you go?

Anyplace where Pointwise has a distributor. I love to travel and have had some really great meals while visiting our overseas partners. I have been lucky enough to visit 10 of our 14 distributors and can tell you about a memorable meal or meals I had in each country.

Creating a Pointwise CAE plugin can be a little confusing. This leads to customers contacting our Support Team with a plugin development question that starts with the phrase “How do I…?” As always, our Support Team is happy to help you with anything Pointwise, including your plugin development questions!

Many of these plugin development inquiries can be simply answered by pointing the customer to the appropriate pages in the Pointwise CAE Plugin SDK documentation. However, the solutions to some inquiries are more complex and require a more in-depth explanation with code examples.

I plan to periodically post these interesting inquiries along with their answers. These posts should provide valuable insight into writing a plugin and using the Pointwise Grid Model.

This installment of Plugin How-To deals with porting an existing plugin to a new version of the SDK.

Q: How do I Port an existing Plugin to a New SDK?

From time to time, Pointwise makes changes to the CAE Plugin SDK. As much as possible, we try to make the changes binary compatible. That is, existing plugins will continue to work with new versions of Pointwise. However, to take advantage of SDK bug fixes or new functionality, you will need to port your plugin source code to the new SDK and recompile it. While there are many ways to port a plugin, I have found the following process to be the least painful. For the purposes of this post, we will be porting a plugin for the fictitious, unstructured solver named CyclopsCFD*.

Get the New CAE Plugin SDK

Before you can port the CyclopsCFD plugin, you will need to download the new SDK, install it on your development machine, and validate the installation as outlined on the How to create a new CAE Plugin Project page of the SDK documentation. After the SDK has been validated, we can begin the port.

Create a New Plugin

The first step of the port is to create a plugin project in the new SDK. This plugin must have the same name as the existing plugin. In this case, it should be named CyclopsCFD. As always, you create a plugin using the mkplugin script.

For a C++ plugin use:

> mkplugin -uns -cpp CyclopsCFD
creating new unstructured cpp plugin 'CaeUnsCyclopsCFD' with ID=40

For a C plugin use:

> mkplugin -uns -c CyclopsCFD
creating new unstructured c plugin 'CaeUnsCyclopsCFD' with ID=40

Before proceeding, I suggest that you build the new CyclopsCFD plugin. See the SDK documentation for details. When the plugin builds successfully, we can proceed with the port.

Copy the Source

Next, you must to copy the standard .cxx and .h source files from the old SDK’s CyclopsCFD project folder to the new SDK’s CyclopsCFD project folder. The source files are be located in the …/PluginSDK/src/plugins/CaeUnsCyclopsCFD directory. The standard source files are created by the mkplugin script. If you added any custom files as part of your plugin’s implementation, you will also need to copy those files. The standard source files are listed below.

rtCaepInstanceData.h
rtCaepSupportData.h
rtCaepInitItems.h
CaeUnsCyclopsCFD.h
runtimeWrite.cxx
CaeUnsCyclopsCFD.cxx (only present for -cpp C++ plugins)

Porting Custom Settings

If your plugin’s implementation uses any custom source files or links against any third party libraries, you will most likely need to manually integrate the changes you made to the build chain. Only you know the details of these changes. You are mostly on your own with this step. However, in general you will need to perform one or more of the following steps.

Under Microsoft Windows, you must configure the Visual Studio solution and CyclopsCFD project.

Under Linux and Mac OSX, you must update the modulelocal.mk file located in the …/PluginSDK/src/plugins/CaeUnsCyclopsCFD directory.

And finally, if your old SDK install used specific PWP_SITE_GROUPID or PWP_SITE_GROUPNAME values, you will need to transfer these values to the new SDK’s site.h file located in the …/PluginSDK/src/plugins directory.

All Done

At this point, the plugin port is done. It should be building successfully on all Pointwise supported platforms. It is now ready for testing. You do test new builds don’t you? Of course you do.

Your Suggestions Welcome

I hope this information is useful. If you have any other ideas for a future Plugin How-To post, please leave a comment below or contact our support staff.

Happy coding!

Find out more about the Pointwise Plugin SDK by clicking on the link below.

* I originally picked UnicornCFD only to find out there really is a solver by that name!

Erick Gantt, Engineering Specialist on the Technical Support Team.

I mesh in a highly structured manner! I grew up in south Georgia, and graduated from Georgia Tech “several” years ago with a Bachelors in Aerospace Engineering, Cooperative Plan. As a Co-op at Georgia Tech I commuted to Fort Worth, TX every other quarter to work at the General Dynamics, Fort Worth Division. It was an incredible experience and opportunity as an undergrad. After finishing up at Georgia Tech I went on to North Carolina State to study hypersonics and CFD. After a few years in grad school I returned to General Dynamics full time. There I spent several years in CFD applications (see my meshing specialty below) making grids, running the in-house solver Falcon, and post-processing the results for my internal customers, mostly propulsion and aero performance guys. After acquiring several years experience using Gridgen, and developing a strong working relationship with the founders of Pointwise, an opportunity came along for me to become their first employee. Then and now, I provide support, training and documentation. I’ve worn some other hats along the way. I just celebrated 18 years at Pointwise this past January!

• Location: Chicago, IL Burbs
• Current position: Engineering Specialist, Technical Support
• Current computer: Dell Precision T3600 running Win7 for daily work; Dell Precision T3610 running RHEL 6 for QA/testing
• One word that best describes how you work: Meticulous

What software or tools do you use every day?

I use Outlook for all of my email communication with customers and co-workers. Adobe FrameMaker 12 is the tool I use for creation/editing of all of our Pointwise documentation, such as the User Manual. I also use PowerPoint for creating and delivering our training material both for our regular courses and for special events like last fall’s Pointwise UGM in Anaheim.  To satisfy my long history of vi use to edit any text files, such as Glyph scripts, I rely on gVim. There are plenty of other tools I use, but these are the regular mainstays of my work. And, of course, I’m constantly running Pointwise in support of our customers, to create new documentation, and perform consulting work when that comes along. I’ll use our current release and sometimes previous releases for support of customers, as well as our development builds for testing and documentation work.

What does your workspace look like?

Erick’s current workspace.

Since I work remotely I have a dedicated home office. I have a cool corner style desk with a built-in monitor shelf and CPU cubby. I have enjoyed this setup for several years. My Windows workstation is set up with dual monitors which make documentation work go so much more easily. Yes, I have an old Dell QuietKey keyboard, I love that thing, and a requisite music system attached. And as you can probably see in my picture my kids are always helping me decorate my work surroundings. I have the usual souvenirs from travel, family pictures and other typical office knick-knacks. I also have a nice portal to the outdoors, allowing me to enjoy fine views of Chicago weather and count the inches of snowfall in the winter.

What are you currently working on?

Being in support, my “currently working on” changes daily! But that’s part of what makes this job fun and always fresh. One of my primary responsibilities in our support group is to look after our international distributors. When they have questions, I’m their first line of support. I’ve had a number of interesting queries from them I have been working on the past several days. I have also been working a lot recently on training, both scheduling and delivering courses, and working on the training documentation itself. Next up? Overset material for discussion at our Let’s Talk Meshing sessions at AIAA Aviation in Dallas this June!

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

This is an easy one: multi-block, point-matched, structured grids. I have a long history with this particular type of mesh, going back to my days at Lockheed Martin where I worked on the F-16, NASP, F-22 and JSF programs. Initially the facility was the General Dynamics, Fort Worth Division. Then it was acquired by Lockheed, and then Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta. So three different companies all at the same desk. But I diverge…

Any tips for our users?

Two:

• For new users, definitely make use of our training. If you attend a course in Fort Worth, it is free for current customers! We take you through the whole code starting with basics and finishing up with more advanced skills. So get trained!
• Let us know when something isn’t working! Too often we will hear at a conference or meeting from a user “when are you going to fix bug xxxx?” And we reply, “well, we didn’t know about bug xxxx.” Let us know if something doesn’t seem to work right. Sometimes, it may just be the task is intended to be done with a different feature.

What project are you most proud of and why?

There are a number of things I could talk about here. But I’ll pick a couple of the most recent from two different aspects of my work. First, I have to say I have been pretty proud of our standard training course. When we first released Pointwise V16, I developed an all new course for the software that took a new approach to our training from what we previously used for Gridgen. I wanted a more interactive, project oriented approach to the material, and that’s what we have. We generally get very good feedback from our training courses. Of course, the material is constantly evolving, and like any project that’s close to you, you can always think of new things to add or improve.

My second recent project I’m proud of is a consulting project I worked on with Nick Wyman, our Director of Applied Research. Unfortunately I can’t say much about it, but it was a very complex mult-block structured grid, we turned it in on target, with the target characteristics, and well, it just looked amazing!

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

I actually don’t use our supported solvers or a post too much. But I would say I use ANSYS Fluent most often simply to test our CAE export from time to time for customers with questions. In the past I’ve mostly run FIELDVIEW as a post processor, for the same reasons.

Are you reading any interesting technical papers we should know about?

We are doing some work on meshes for the folks involved with the Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop. I have mostly been recently reading some technical presentations shared among the workshop group, but I look forward to some papers on the topic coming this summer at AIAA Aviation. This is very interesting work impacting hopefully the next generation of air transport.

Do you plan on attending any conferences or workshops this year?

I’ll be at AIAA Aviation, as a matter of fact. We will have a cool Let’s Talk Meshing session on the Sunday prior for folks who want to hear about some of our newest features. And I will be around during the week talking to folks at our exhibit booth. Come by and see us!

What do you do when you’re not generating meshes?

Oh boy, this could be another long list… But a high priority is of course my two kids, their school and activities. I try to take care of myself, so I bicycle regularly. I’m very lucky to have some natural trails nearby that run along the Des Plaines river here in the burbs, and I bike the trails as much as I can. I also have a nice 46 gallon freshwater aquarium that I love to look after. And when I have the time, I love to read, about my hobbies, and good hard SciFi.

What is some of the best CFD advice you’ve ever received?

“Give up on thinking that you can create a grid on the geometry as it is exactly.” And I’m not talking about geometry that has gaps, overlaps, that sort of thing. I’m talking about back when I was creating mult-block structured grids daily on complex geometries. Invariably for that type of mesh, on a complex geometry, somewhere along the way you will have to modify the geometry in order to make the grid topology work. Of course when I started that work, right out of school, I thought it could be meshed exactly. I don’t do those types of grids as much these days, but that advice will always apply.

If you had to pick a place to have dinner, where would you go?

Since I work remotely, I’ll take the opportunity to pick a place at home and back in Fort Worth where our main offices are. Back in Fort Worth, I can say without a doubt, since I’m a Tex-Mex indulger, that Joe T. Garcia’s is my hands down favorite place to stop by when I’m in town. There are so many great places in Fort Worth, though, I could make a list. Here at home, a recent favorite is Lai Thai. They have some yummy curry dishes, but their Pad Thai noodles are to die for.

Software

• My nomination for best new CFD code name of the year so far: Chombo-Crunch.
• Code_Saturne 4.0 is now available for download.

Berkeley researchers introduced CFD and reactive transport code Chombo-Crunch. Image from LBL.gov. Click image for article.

Meshing

• What’s Next for CFD in which 11 industry experts and yours truly are asked “What is holding CFD back?” Hint: “All about the mesh.”
• The RhinoPolyhedra plugin has been updated.
• Air Meshes for Robust Collision Handling

The T.MAP plugin for Rhino (beta release) is available from EvoluteTools. Image from evolute.at. Click image for announcement.

 CAD

• Autodesk’s AnyCAD allows full associativity and automatic updates between other CAD systems and Inventor.
• Desktop Engineer’s Kenneth Wong shares his thoughts on simulation appification in this video.
• Beyond PLM compares Onshape to “Google Drive for CAD.”

Applications

• ESI made a move into the electronics cooling market with their acquisition of PRESTO.

Lenovo used FloTHERM to simulate cooling inside their ThinkStation products. Image from Desktop Engineering. Click image for article.

Viz

• Tecplot 360 EX 2015 R2 is now available.
• Kitware introduced a new Paraview feature: quartile chart view.
• Here’s the best of the visualization web for March 2015.

Computing

Illustration of adaptive mesh sampling from the paper Power Particles: An Incompressible Fluid Flow Solver Based On Power Diagrams by de Goes et al. Image from Cal Tech. Click image for full paper.

• DEVELOP3D shares information on ANSYS Enterprise Cloud which is based on Amazon Web Services.
• STAR-CCM+ was run on 55,000 cores while exhibiting “perfect” scalability. On a related note, read about CD-adapco’s history of supercomputing.
• The folks at Siemens PLM Software write about CAE automation.

Events

Spray drying with CFD. Image from ChemEurope.com. Click image for article.

• For your reading pleasure: Libre Mechanics, “open knowledge on engineering development.”
• Beta CAE announced the agenda for their upcoming international conference.
• Two upcoming courses fromERCOFTAC:
  • Transition Modeling in Munich on 21-22 May 2015
  • Design Optimization: Methods and Applications in Stockholm on 28-29 May 2015

A Meshed Hat

Chris Johanson, My Funny Hat, 2011. Click image for source.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s blog delves a little bit and only tangentially into a topic that I’m a bit interested in. Namely the proliferation of faceting (aka reticulation) in modern painting (i.e. triangles are trendy). As a case in point they reference the work of Chris Johanson and his imitators.