This year’s International Meshing Roundtable was held just down the road from Pointwise, in Austin, Texas on 11-14 October 2015. Now in its 24th incarnation, the IMR is the event for mesh generation as it brings together meshing researchers and practitioners from government, academic, and industrial organizations worldwide.

Sandia National Labs began hosting the IMR back in 1992 and remains the event’s primary host, benefactor, and organizer. Each year’s event is run by a volunteer steering committee consisting. The AIAA’s Meshing, Visualization, and Computational Environments technical committee is an active co-sponsor and always has representation on the steering committee. Plus, the IMR solicits sponsorships each year to help provide financial support for students and postdocs. [In the interest of full disclosure, Pointwise sponsors the IMR, I have served on its steering committee, and I’m a member of AIAA’s MVCE. So forgive me if I’m biased.]

Short Courses

The four short courses at this year’s IMR were:

• Jonathan Shewchuk from Berkeley on Tetrahedral Mesh Improvement and Dynamic Meshing [always an excellent presentation]
• Jessica Zhang from Carnegie Mellon on Image-Based Mesh Generation and Volumetric T-spline Modeling for Isogeometric Analysis
• John Verdicchio from Cambridge Flow Solutions on Commercial Mesh Generation – Why It’s Different to Being at University. [I’m told this was a lively course and it led to a follow-on discussion in the Open Spaces session.]
• Matthew Staten from Sandia on Introduction to Quad and Hex Mesh Generation and Modification

Technical Presentations

Invited speaker Thierry Coupez opened the IMR with a rousing presentation on his work in adaptive meshing (the goal being to make a mesh that’s unique to the solution).

Thierry Coupez, Ecole Centrale de Nantes

INRIA’s Adrien Loseille presented their work on fast adaptive meshing. Their target benchmark performance is 1 billion cells in 15 minutes on 100 processors because that hardware is representative of what an engineering organization might typically have. [In other words, let’s not target a massively parallel HPC system that only 1% of users have access to.]

The IMR’s professional development session is something I enjoy listening to. It’s targeted for students and postdocs so they can gain insight into meshing as a career. [RUN AWAY! No seriously, it’s about where their field is going and how they can get a job.] This year’s session was centered around the results of the pre-conference survey the IMR conducted of meshing professionals. [I plan to write more about the survey later.] Sadly, there were few questions from the audience and it makes me wonder how we can better serve the needs of students. The session’s general conclusions were:

• Hex meshing remains the primary need/want.
• Funding for academic research in meshing is spotty.
• The physics of the solution need to be linked to the mesh (i.e. adaption)
• Meshing needs to be cost effective, robust, and cheap. [Better, faster, and cheaper? I thought we could only get 2 of the 3.]
• We need to strive toward providing a mesh that balances the quality of the simulation and the resources required to compute it.

One of the panelists (I’ve forgotten whom) said that experience with parallel programming will help you get a job.

from Omar Ghattas’ presentation on Large-scale Bayesian Inverse Problems and the Flow of the Arctic Ice Sheet

Omar Ghattas from the University of Texas gave an extremely interesting presentation on melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. His work may have been the most complicated simulation I have ever seen and another attendee remarked that Dr. Ghattas was easily the smartest person in the room because each attendee could probably cite at least one thing he said that went over their head. But consider what he’s trying to compute. He wants to understand what’s happening at the ice-ground interface because that’s key to understanding whether melting will accelerate, decelerate or remain at the same rate. But that’s a boundary condition. So the inverse problem becomes one of simulating the ice flowing and melting to match satellite observations to determine what the boundary condition actually is. [At least, that’s how I understood it.] Antarctica’s ice is melting at the rate of 200 billion gallons per year. This is expected to lead to a half meter rise in sea levels by the year 2070. This rise will impact 136 coastal cities, 150 million people, and $35 trillion of assets.

Sam Landier’s presentation of Boolean Operations on Arbitrary Polyhedral Meshes delved deeply into work that’s available in ONERA’s Cassiopee package. Their work always fascinates me.

Open Spaces consisted of self-organized 1-hour discussions on topics decided upon by attendees on-the-spot. Think of them like birds-of-a-feather sessions but with no advance notice of what they’ll be. I don’t have a good feel for how effective they were.

Meshing Contest

For the third consecutive year, the IMR has hosted a meshing contest for which they supply CAD models and mesh criteria and evaluate the suitability of the submitted meshes. (The CAD models are still online should you want to try them yourself.)

This year they supplied two geometries: a CAD model of an electric guitar and a 3D scan of the human abdomen. We at Pointwise meshed both and then struggled to figure out how to use both of them on a poster. Fortunately, we were inspired by the fact that the IMR overlapped by one day with the Austin City Limits music festival.

Pointwise’s winning IMR meshing contest poster.

Even more fortunately, Pointwise’s mesh was named winner of the meshing contest. [We’ll probably write more about the meshes at a future date.]

This year’s IMR trophies were an inspired collection of unique glass sculptures.

Awards

• Best Poster: High-Order Unstructured Curved Mesh Generation Using the Winslow Equations, Meire Fortunato and Per-Olof Persson, University of California at Berkeley
• Best Student Paper: On Indecomposable Polyhedra and the Number of Steiner Points, Nadja Goerigk and Hang Si, Weierstrass Institute
• Best Technical Paper: Parallel Generation of Large-Size Adapted Meshes, Adrien Loseille, Victorien Menier, Frederic Alauzet, INRIA

IMR Fellow

This year’s IMR Fellow is Dr. Tim Tautges from CD-adapco.

Sandia’s Ted Blacker (left) presents the IMR Fellow award to Tim Tautges (right). If they appear to be laughing, it’s because Ted dropped the glass plaque and broke it.

Summary

The IMR is growing. Next year’s event expands to five days, Mon-Fri, 26-30 September 2016 in Washington, DC. Short courses will be held on Monday. I’m told that the expanded event will provide more opportunities for meshing implementations and applied meshing.

Complete conference proceedings are available online.

Caveat 1: I admit to being a terrible photographer.

Caveat 2: Dear Presenter, please put down the laser pointer. It’s not helping. In fact, it’s making things worse. Much, much worse.

High Fidelity Overset Structured Mesh Generation for Marine Hydrokinetic Devices

Researchers at The Pennsylvania State University used the overset grid assembly tools in Pointwise to generate high-quality structured overset meshes for analysis of a horizontal axis water turbine. The flexibility offered by overset grids made it easy for them to add higher resolution grid blocks to resolve regions with high flow gradients like the turbine blade tips, wakes and tip vortices. This resulted in good agreement with experimental data even for flow details like the interaction between blade wakes and the support tower. (more)

Learn Advanced Pointwise Techniques Online

In 2016 Pointwise will begin offering online advanced training courses on structured meshing and Glyph scripting. The structured meshing course shows how to choose the best grid topology for difficult cases and how to improve grid quality when problems are found. The Glyph scripting course covers how to organize large, complex geometry and grid models and techniques for controlling the structured grid elliptic and unstructured grid T-Rex (anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion) solvers. (more)

Controlling Localized Element Size Gradation in an Unstructured Mesh

At Pointwise, we continuously work on ways to make meshing faster, easier, and higher quality. That could be through increased automation, additional control over the mesh, or general meshing enhancements. In this article, we discuss the technical basis for a new feature we are working on for our next major release, Pointwise V18. Tetrahedral sources, paired with a new rapid 3-D shape creation tool, will give you more control over tetrahedron sizes on the interior of a volume with fewer constraints than baffles. (more)

Meshing the 24th IMR Fender^® Jazzmaster Guitar and the Abdominal Atlas

Last month several Pointwise engineers attended the 24th International Meshing Roundtable (IMR) held in Austin, Texas. We brought two grids generated for two benchmark geometries provided by the IMR steering committee. The grids were made by Carolyn Woeber, Travis Carrigan, and myself. We were pleased to hear that the grids were recognized both for their technical merit and striking visuals – they had won the Meshing Contest award. (more)

Recent News and Upcoming Events

Software

• simulationHub is a new, cloud-based CFD application.
• Materialise released Magics20 for preparing geometry for 3D printing.
• CCE released free CAD viewer, EnSuite-View.
• FFT released Actran 16 with several new features for aeroacoustic simulations.
• Beta CAE launched v16.1.0 of their software suite including ANSA for preprocessing.
• Comet Solutions launched Cloud-based SimApps, expertly tailored simulation applications.
• COMSOL Multiphysics 5.2 was released with updates across its entire range of functionality.
• ParaView is enhancing their remote visualization capabilities through a partnership with NICE’s Desktop Cloud Visualization.
• Autodesk launched a beta program for cloud-based 3D design with Fusion-360 in the browser.

Pointwise News & Updates

• Our next webinar on 08 December will be on the topic of overset grid generation and flow simulation using Pointwise, Suggar++, and Caelus.
• You can see how Pointwise interacts with OpenVSP for conceptual design in a pre-recorded webcast.
• Download the winning image from our desktop wallpaper contest (see image below).
• Come visit with us next week at the APS DFD meeting in Boston.

Tessa Uroić’s winning image of a mesh for a Formula 1 tire. See link above.

Hardware and Applications

• Nor-Tech announced the availability of a demo cluster for CFD.
• Learn how to analyze the flow in a choke valve using midas NFX CFD.
• Symscape shares thoughts on tailoring geometry specifically for CFD simulation.
• Here’s part 3 in the series on meshing in SolidWorks Flow Simulation.
• CD-adapco is using Panasas’ storage technology to speed multidisciplinary simulations.

CD-adapco simulation of an offshore drilling rig. Image from Scientific Computing. See link above.

Biz, Event, Job

• Our friends at ANSYS were recognized by Software Magazine as one of the 500 largest software providers, coming in this year at #106.
• Registration is now open for the NAFEMS Americas Conference, 7-9 June in Seattle.
• Halliburton wants to hire a Mechanical Technical Advisor for CFD in Houston.

The Movement of Air

What does modern dance have to do with fluid dynamics? I asked myself the same question before watching this video by Adrien M / Claire B called The Movement of Air in which three dancers interact with projections of fluids in motion and even a few grids.

What’s notable is that the animations aren’t pre-recorded; they respond in real-time to the dancer’s movements. (As first seen on Colossal.)

The Movement of Air, dance performance by Adrien M and Claire B. Screen capture from a video on vimeo. See link above.

During this past October, I had the pleasure of joining the Pointwise team on a trip to Japan for the 2015 VINAS User Group Meeting. VINAS (Visual Integration & Numerical Analysis Systems) is a Japanese company specializing in the distribution and support of numerous CAE and CFD products, including the Pointwise meshing software. At the conference, I was invited to present our open-source SU2 suite for CFD analysis and design (https://github.com/su2code), which was a great opportunity to reach a new audience.

The trip began in Osaka and ended in Tokyo. In between, I tried to maximize my interactions with Japanese food, culture, and of course, the people. Only an engineer would think of a trip like this as an optimization problem.

Getting Started in Osaka and Kyoto

Before leaving the US, many people encouraged me to explore and enjoy the food. Having been raised in the middle of the US away from the coasts, I was not well-versed in the seafood-heavy fare that I was about to find in Japan. However, upon arrival, I planned to completely immerse myself in the food. This meant two things:

1. I had to up my chopstick game quickly.
2. I wanted to tackle anything made available to me, including so called “challenge” foods for westerners.

I had an easy warmup with the chopsticks on some gyoza, which were relatively easy to grip with the sticks. Within a few hours, I was “immersing myself” into some fresh octopus. By the end of the week, I had sampled many of the well-known dishes: fresh sushi of all sorts, ramen, udon, tonkatsu, unagi, shabu shabu, and others. I’ll be having more Japanese food locally now with hopes of recapturing the magic and keeping up my chopstick skills.

A beautiful example of the high quality presentation that you can see in Japanese meals.

The dining experience brings out the amazing attention to detail that I encountered throughout Japanese culture. Presentation and ceremony play leading roles right alongside taste. Meals typically arrive in many small portions, each having its own vessel with distinct decoration and purpose. Shared dishes and rituals, such as refilling your neighbor’s glass when empty, really enhanced group dining.

One recurring trend that I had read about beforehand, but couldn’t quite appreciate until I experienced it, was the blending of old and new culture in Japan. I was repeatedly (and pleasantly) surprised when our group would fight through traffic or crowds on busy city streets only to have the entire hustle and bustle peel away within steps to leave us in an ancient shrine or temple. It was interesting to learn that more emphasis is placed on the location of the temple/shrine rather than on man-made structures or buildings sitting on it, which often come down and are rebuilt over time. As one might expect, these sites specialize in peaceful atmosphere and natural beauty.

Visiting Kinkaku-ji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion) in Kyoto.

Other impressions from the Osaka / Kyoto area:

• I enjoyed the mythology behind the temples and shrines. Themes emerged around doors / paths / choices, fortunes or wish granting, and dedicating sacred places after specific actions, often tied to animals.
• Vertical space is leveraged more and differently than in the US. Buildings often unfold like labyrinths in unexpected ways with different levels.
• History and landmarks are old on a scale that we don’t often encounter in the US. For instance, the 400th anniversary of the war between the Toyotomi and Tokugawa clans was being recognized during our visit to Osaka Castle.

The first portion of the journey came to a close with a high-speed train ride to Tokyo on the Shinkansen line. Naturally, I went to the front of the train immediately and thought about how I would set up the aerodynamic shape optimization problem in SU2 for designing the outer mold line of the train’s nose and body.

The nose of a bullet train on the Shinkansen line.

Visiting JAXA Chofu

After arriving in Tokyo, but before the start of the conference, we made a visit to the JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, http://global.jaxa.jp) Chofu research center, where the focus is on research and technology for aviation. During this visit, we met with the current developers of FaSTAR, an unstructured CFD code created at JAXA. We exchanged presentations on our strategies for solver development as well as our current and future directions.

While FaSTAR and SU2 contain quite a few similar features and methods, we have differing approaches in our development. SU2 is an open-source code, while FaSTAR is not, and this has important implications for our priorities as developers.

For example, our philosophies differ when it comes to flexibility and performance. In SU2, we deliberately favor in-house solutions over external libraries (when we can) and leverage object-oriented programming in C++ so that the code is easy for the community to understand, compile on many architectures, and modify. This is typically at odds with performance, and as a result, we have put in extra effort as a development team to maintain high performance with SU2. In contrast, the FaSTAR team has prioritized speed above all else. In that regard, they have achieved some impressive results in reducing the time-to-solution of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) calculations around realistic applications down to minutes on their latest supercomputing hardware (for engineering accuracy).

Inside the JAXA visitor center with Yasuhiko Fujikawa (VINAS, left) and Rick Matus (Pointwise, right).

We also discussed high-performance computing (HPC) in general and our strategies for attaining scalable, high performance with the codes. Topics included emerging hardware architectures, how new architectures are affecting their parallel programming models, and where they see things going in Japan given recent upgrades to their HPC system (JSS2).

Similar to the current trend in the US, they are pursuing hybrid programming models to unlock the multiple levels of parallelism on emerging systems. We are both investigating the so-called “MPI + X” model, where MPI is used for coarse-grain parallelism across distributed memory systems while something else (the “X”) is used to achieve fine-grain parallelism within a single compute node (threading and/or SIMD).

Having spent some time at our NASA centers in the US, I should also mention that I felt very at home on the JAXA Chofu campus. If I squinted hard enough, I could imagine it as NASA Langley or Ames given the similar layout and style to the buildings.

VINAS UGM in Tokyo

The 2015 VINAS Users Conference was held in the Tokyo Conference Center Shinagawa. The overall themes of the conference were open-source CFD solvers (Day 1), pre- and post-processing for CFD (Day 1), turbomachinery design and optimization (Day 2), and HPC cloud computing and high speed calculation (Day 2). I was very impressed with the professionalism with which the conference was executed, from the live translation of talks from English to Japanese, all the way down to the subtle touches like special lighting during the introduction of speakers.

Intelligent Light’s Yves-Marie Lefebvre showed off some features from the new FieldView version 16 (http://www.ilight.com/en/products/fieldview-16) early in the day. Two items that particularly intrigued me are their ability to export into 3D PDF format and their free XDBview software. It was my first exposure to 3D PDF, and it looks to be particularly useful when sharing and communicating results for CFD. Sometimes a quick pan and/or rotate around a 3D solution gets the message across when a series of flat images and words are failing (or, at best, taking much longer). I also noted that Boeing is part of the consortium of companies supporting the development and growth of 3D PDF.

A partial shot of the VINAS UGM agenda for Day 1.

Rick Matus from Pointwise teased a number of features from the upcoming version 18 of their flagship software product along with several examples of the meshing package at work. As a developer of an unstructured CFD solver, I eagerly await the unstructured quad or quad dominant surface meshing coming in Pointwise V18. Couple that with T-Rex for automatically generating boundary layer-resolving meshes, and you might just get the best of both worlds: hex cells for accuracy where you need it most while maintaining efficient unstructured mesh construction around complex geometries.

Open-source software played a prominent role in the first day of the conference. After giving an overview of how the open-source SU2 suite can be used for CFD analysis and design optimization, I listened intently to back-to-back presentations by ENGYS’ Paulo Geremia on the HELYX software suite. HELYX is package for CFD design and optimization that is built around the open-source OpenFOAM library (http://engys.com/products/helyx). The presence of efficient adjoint-based methods for gradient-based optimization within HELYX (similar to methods we develop and apply within SU2) was particularly noteworthy for me.

Presenting the open-source SU2 suite and several design applications at the VINAS UGM 2015.

Talks by Torbjörn Larsson and Pierre-Jean Tardy offered an insider’s look at the cutting-edge engineering work within the Formula 1 industry. Strict F1 rules and regulations dictate how teams spend their time and energy in search of performance improvements. I have often heard about the heavy use of CFD throughout the sport, but the integration of CFD into their design processes went much deeper than I expected.

The full program for the VINAS Users Conference can be found here: http://www.vinas.com/en/ugm2015/program_day1.html.

Elsewhere in the Tokyo Area

Despite its large size and high population density (or perhaps made necessary because of it), Tokyo exhibits serious efficiency in its operation. You can sense the ebb and flow all around you in the sounds of hundreds of footsteps in the corridor of the train station or the sight of hundreds of people queueing up near the massive crosswalks (Shibuya Crossing being the most obvious example). The train system was impressive, and its vast web makes it easy to get just about anywhere around Tokyo with the combination of a train ride and a short walk. By the end of the week, even a foreigner like myself had a decent grip on the different lines and stations and felt comfortable getting around town.

By the way, the citizens of Tokyo take the commute mentioned above in style. Everywhere I looked, I saw well-tailored suits and dresses, stylish jackets and sweaters, and eye-catching accessories. This was yet another example of the attention to detail that I found throughout Japan.

A few additional items that struck me in and around Tokyo:

• The vast open spaces surrounding the Imperial Palace, including patches of grass so fine and bright that they looked like a layer of green fog covering the ground.
• The architecture of the buildings in the Ginza shopping district. It feels like the buildings themselves are competing to be noticed by including unique design elements, such as the irregular window pattern on the Mikimoto building.
• The fascinating array of seafood on display at the Tsukiji fish market in all manner of colors, shapes, and sizes.

Conclusion

Overall, this trip had a little bit of everything, including unforgettable food, sights, and excellent technical content. I left with a great impression of Japan and its friendly people, and I am looking forward to my next visit.

I enjoyed meeting many new folks in the solver and visualization industries, and I hope that I have passed along some of our enthusiasm for open-source solvers through my presentation on SU2.

Lastly, I would like to thank Yasuhiko Fujikawa and his entire team at VINAS for being wonderful hosts and Heather McCoy, Rick Matus, and Carolyn Woeber from Pointwise for all of their time and energy spent showing me their favorite places in Japan and making me feel at home in a new place.

Disclaimer: The opinions above are entirely my own and not those of VINAS or Pointwise. I would also like to note that my travel expenses for attending the conference were generously covered by both companies. 

Dr. Thomas D. Economon is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University, where he received MS and PhD degrees in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics. He holds a BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Notre Dame. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics, optimal shape design via adjoint-based methods, and high performance computing. He serves as the co-lead developer of the open-source SU2 CFD suite.

Carolyn Woeber, Manager of the Technical Support Team.

Over time, I’ve realized that I’m in this for the adventure.  I’m sure you are laughing at that, but it’s true.  Discovering and doing mesh generation for me has been one big adventure right from the beginning.

I grew up in the countryside outside the small town of Florence, Mississippi.  If you are ever driving through Mississippi, you’ll know you have gone through Florence when you drive past our two competing catfish houses, Berry’s and Jerry’s.  Both restaurants sit in iconic buildings, a huge barn and an igloo respectively.  Both places make my little hometown stand out and have some of the best fried catfish you’ve ever eaten.

Both my Bachelors and Masters degrees in Aerospace Engineering came from Mississippi State University.  While attending MSU, I had many positive influences that mentored me and helped me realize that I wanted to make a career out of computational fluid dynamics (CFD).  During my undergraduate and graduate school years, I took all the CFD and grid generation courses offered and had the opportunity to work as a research assistant at the nearby National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (now known as the SimCenter).  The real-world work I did as a student helped cement everything I learned in my coursework and really got me hooked. It was one of the most immersive and effective learning experiences I’ve ever had.  I wish that more students could learn about grid generation and CFD in a similar fashion.

After Mississippi State, I began work at Pointwise as a Support Engineer where I was immediately tasked with two daunting jobs.  One, become a Gridgen expert in a short period of time.  Two, take the one user manual that had been used for previous versions of Gridgen and create three volumes of material: a User Manual detailing every command, a Tutorial Workbook that walks through how to use all the commands, and a Glyph Reference Manual containing the man pages for our scripting language.  Porting, rewriting, and improving the Gridgen documentation into a new form quickly helped me achieve my first goal of learning about every Gridgen command in the book (literally).  Daily phone calls and emails from our customers – domestic and international – exposed me to all the different application areas and ways in which our customers generated meshes.

I know at this point you may be thinking that this all sounds boring. But for me, I was in love with it.  Every single day I came to work and had a new challenge to conquer and a new lesson to learn.  I moved on to learn all the other roles that our Support Department engineers fulfill, generating meshes for consulting projects, teaching training classes, designing new features for Pointwise, and performing and managing the quality assurance of our code.  Along the way, I also learned a great deal about what it is to work with software and to work with people.  Eventually, I took on the role of Manager of the Technical Support Department and I’ve been filling those shoes for the past several years.  The thing I love the most about my job at Pointwise is that mesh generation never gets old.  I still feel like I get to learn something new, whether it’s from a customer or a coworker, every single day.

• Location: Fort Worth, TX
• Current Position: Manager, Technical Support Department
• Current Computers:
  • Dell Precision T3500, Intel Xeon 3.2 GHz, 24 GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro 4000, Windows 7 64-bit
  • Dell Precision T7500, 2x Quad Core Processor,E5640,2.66GHz, 96GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro 4000, Linux RedHat 5 64-bit
• One word that describes how you work: Enthusiastically

What software or tools do you use every day?

First and foremost I spend a large percentage of my time using Pointwise, both our current production release and our in-house version where we are developing new features.  The thing I love about using Pointwise to make meshes is that our team has managed to take all the good things that we did in Gridgen and put them in this new package that makes all the functionality so visible.  It’s been done in such a way as to be intuitive to most users.  Mesh generation gets a bad rap for being hard to pick up due to the steep learning curve.  I personally feel that what we’ve done with Pointwise mitigates that a great deal and take the pain out of making a mesh.

I use Programmer’s Notepad to write Glyph scripts for use in Pointwise.  Also all the typical Office products get used on a daily basis (Word, Powerpoint, Excel).  I probably shouldn’t admit this but I use Excel a ridiculous amount.  You really can make a spreadsheet for everything. Trust me. I use TweetDeck to talk about aerospace and CFD information that interests me and Spark to collaborate with the rest of the Pointwise staff.

Finally, I use SageCRM to monitor and check on our customer sites and their ongoing support.  If you’ve ever contacted us for help, you have had a case opened by one of the support engineers here.  The cases in Sage allow the entire support team to have access to the problems and/or questions ongoing with our customers.  Needless to say this helps us to keep up to date with the current state of the software and to also take over a support case if someone is unexpectedly out for a day.  Our goal is to make sure you always get prompt, reliable, helpful support.  This tool, along with good teamwork and communication, allow us to meet that goal every day.

What does your workspace look like?

Carolyn’s current workspace.

I work in the first floor of our building and have a wonderful office.  I sit across a scenic hallway from most of the Support team and I have lots of room for all my computers, notes, and technical papers.  I also have a fluffy soft loveseat I dragged in here and shoe-horned in front of my desk.  It is a comfy place for my coworkers to park it when we are collaborating in one-on-one meetings.  I also have years’ worth of my favorite pieces of Pointwise knickknacks (did you ever see the Gridgen Rubik’s cube or hacky-sack ball?) as well as the odd Star Wars collectible here and there.  Last but not least, I have on display my favorite aircraft model of the SR-71 Blackbird.

I had the fortune to bring Robert Gilliland, a Blackbird test pilot, in as a speaker to the Engineering Research Center when I worked there.  He was gracious enough to send me this model later on which I have prized for many years.

What are you currently working on?

A lot of everything. It’s good because I enjoy having plenty of meshing projects to keep me busy.  On that front, I just finished designing and writing some exciting new features for mixed cell generation which will be implemented in Pointwise Version 18.  Some of these features are already partially implemented which means I’m getting to test (ahem, break) them as well.  In the course of a normal week, it seems like I’m always making or tweaking meshes for customers but I cannot tell you about most of those due to their sensitive nature.

However, there are a few meshes I’ve made recently that I can share.  In October, I generated an unstructured mesh on a Fender Jazzmaster guitar for the International Meshing Roundtable.  This mesh along with one made by Claudio Pita and Travis Carrigan for an STL geometry of an abdominal atlas won the 2015 IMR Meshing Contest award.

Pointwise 24th IMR poster submission showing the final grids inspired by the Austin City Limits music festival.

If you attended our recent Let’s Talk Meshing workshops in Stuttgart, Germany you got to see some meshing I’ve done recently to generate unstructured hexahedra on an automotive intake.  The case was an interesting one because there were a couple of different meshing topologies I could have used for the geometry.  The topology I decided on had structured domains on the inlet pipes and unstructured domains on the remainder of the geometry where creating structured surface topologies would have been tedious.  The entrance to the inlet pipes was a set of O-H structured domains that would be used by adjacent blocks in the grid.

Unstructured hexes created by T-Rex interface with the O-H structured topology at the inlet to the intake manifold.

The challenge for most people would be in generating an unstructured boundary layer mesh that matched those structured O-H domains.  Since our T-Rex technique (anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion) now supports structured match domains, I simply designated those domains with a T-Rex boundary condition so it would march along them, then set up the rest of the parameters for growing my boundary layer grid.  T-Rex marched pyramids and anisotropic tets off the surface grids then transitioned the interior to an isotropic Delaunay mesh.  On export, the cells grown off the structured and unstructured domains were converted into hexes and prisms respectively.  The entire mesh took less than an hour to construct.

Besides meshing projects, I’ve been working with my support team to plan out our offerings for next year’s training classes.  We are all preparing for our first online courses we’ll teach in February and March and working on designing material for new classes beyond that.  Additionally, I’m always looking for new ways to teach or explain mesh generation (and Pointwise) so I’m working on a redesign of all our user documentation.

Last, but not least, I’m on the committee for the High Lift Prediction Workshop and contribute grids to that effort.  I’ll start work soon on generating initial unstructured grids for the 3rd High Lift Prediction Workshop.  If you are unfamiliar with it, I invite you to check out the results from the last workshop.

A view of the slats, wing, flaps and brackets from the DLR-F11 used in the 2nd High Lift Prediction Workshop.

Every iteration of this workshop I have been involved with has been an excellent learning experience for me.  I have had the opportunity to make meshes for a community of people and receive invaluable feedback about what works (and what doesn’t) for a variety of solvers for this application area.  The lessons I have learned have directly impacted design decisions I have made for new features in future versions of Pointwise.

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

Unstructured viscous meshing with T-Rex is most definitely my specialty. In 2006 we started working on a technique that allowed us to extrude stacked layers of right-angle tets from a triangular surface mesh.  Originally, this came about because we wanted to provide a smooth transition from prism blocks to the isotropic meshes on top of them.  Then once the feature was released in 2007, our customers started using it in many different ways.  At that point, we realized how powerful the feature could be if we just started directly from a surface mesh on a geometry (instead of an extruded prism block) then converted those stacked tets into prisms instead.  We implemented those features into T-Rex as well as collision detection, corner treatment, and sensitivity to various quality metrics.  There have been many advancements and improvements to the technique in the ensuing years (hello unstructured hexes!) and the result is meshing style that has allowed me to make large, complex high-quality grids quickly and easily ever since.

Any tips for our users?

Plan your mesh then follow a logical and consistent process to create it.  Every time.

As an example, here’s the process I follow for every unstructured mesh I make:

• Review the geometry for cleanliness and geometric complexity.
• Find out what type of flow phenomena the desired mesh is supposed to resolve. If experimental data exists, review it to see the location and structure of the flow mechanisms of interest about the geometry.
• Sketch the topology you’ll need to use for your mesh to capture and resolve flow mechanisms of interest.
• Create a solid model for the geometry to ensure that the geometry is watertight (no holes, gaps, or overlaps).
• Define where surface grids (domains) should be created. We call these topological regions quilts in Pointwise. They are often areas that need to have a specific boundary condition applied later on at export time or they are regions bounded by geometric discontinuities (hard edges).
• Set defaults for grid dimensioning that are in line with the size of mesh you need to create.
• Generate your surface mesh on the solid model automatically.
• Adjust grid spacings on the surface mesh in critical areas.
• Define a farfield mesh and create the definition of the unstructured volume between it and the surface mesh (a block).
• Define the T-Rex parameters for the block and initialize it based on those parameters.
• Review quality metrics for the mesh and adjust the surface mesh or T-Rex parameters as necessary to improve them.
• Once mesh quality is acceptable, set boundary conditions for the desired flow solver and export the mesh to it.

What project are you most proud of and why?

My other answers have probably already answered this question but I would have to say it is my work on the design of T-Rex and some of our other unstructured techniques and features.  I’ve spent many hours trying to determine what it is that our customers need in regards to unstructured meshing and how we can meet those needs.

I don’t think any technique is a silver bullet but I feel like with each year that passes we get closer and closer with the additions we continue to make to our unstructured mesh generation tools. I’m proud of having helped move this technology along to its current state.  If you haven’t tried it by now, please do.  If you ever want to talk about T-Rex or ask questions, I’m always happy to chat with you about it.

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

I don’t really do much work with CFD solvers directly.  Typically, I will generate meshes in pair with someone running a solver and we’ll provide each other with feedback about what is needed and what was done to meet those needs respectively.

Occasionally, I will fire up OpenFOAM or ANSYS Fluent to check a mesh but I would not say I’m a hardcore user by any means.

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

I have a list of papers from this year’s AIAA Aviation conference that I’ve been working my way through.  There are two in particular that I’ve been digesting this month.  The first one is F-16XL Hybrid Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes/Large Eddy Simulation on Unstructured Grids by M. Park, K.S. Abdol-Hamid, and A. Elmiligui. The second paper I’ve been reading is Target-Edge based Orthogonal Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation by J. D. Z. Vasquez and C. F. Ollivier-Gooch.  The results obtained by Drs. Vasquez and Ollivier-Gooch were impressive and I look forward to seeing where they take their research next.

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

Since the year is almost over, I’ll talk about the three conferences/workshops I went to this past year.

In June, I went to AIAA Aviation in Dallas, TX where I attended many of the paper sessions and a few meetings as well. There were two sessions which were really the highlights of the conference for me as an attendee.  The first was a special session on historically significant/influential papers in applied aerodynamics featuring talks by R. Liebeck, P. Spalart, and A. Jameson. Each presentation was packed with people and I think we all enjoyed hearing about these seminal papers and the research behind them.  The second highlight of the conference was the special session on the Future of Fluids: Next Generation CFD.  There were many insights shared by some of the leaders in our field on how they think we will get CFD to the next level.

In October, I had the opportunity to go to the 2015 VINAS Users Group Meeting in Tokyo, Japan.  VINAS distributes our software in Japan and has a large conference each year where the users of all the software they distribute gather for presentations and workshops.  On the last day of the conference, I taught a T-Rex workshop for our Japanese users.

In November, we did our first Let’s Talk Meshing Workshop in Stuttgart, Germany, where I did a seminar on creating unstructured hexahedra with T-Rex in an automotive intake manifold.

What do you do when you are not generating meshes?

Most of my spare time is spent with my husband and our 10-month old baby boy.  He’s constantly learning about the world around him and we are enjoying seeing the world through his eyes.  From the joy of playing in an empty box to discovering the fun crinkle of leaves in his hands, he reminds us every day not to take the small things for granted.

When I’m not babying, I like to indulge in my passion for photography.  I have a Nikon DSLR and an array of different fun lenses I cart around.  A year or two ago I took some courses from a local university and learned the basics.  Since then I have been taking every opportunity I get to photograph landscapes, portraits, action shots, etc.  It’s a fun hobby and, at this point, simply requires a great deal of hard drive space for all my experimentation.

Many of my other hobbies are shared with my husband.  We love to work together and have mutual interests in woodworking, car restoration, and barbeque.  In our garage, we’ve assembled a collection of power tools that we periodically use to recreate some piece of furniture we saw in a store or on Pinterest.  Beside our garage I have my grandfather’s 1964 Comet that we are very slowly working on restoring. On the barbeque front, my husband makes phenomenal brisket and ribs in his reverse flow smoker while I enjoy cooking hawgs for friends and family.

Two hawgs half-way through the 24 hour cooking process.

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

When problems arise in your mesh, look at the foundation of the mesh first.

The connectors and domains in each grid have a huge influence on the quality of the associated volume cells. Do you have a connector with an undesirable distribution of grid points? If so, that’s going to bleed into the quality of the associated domains and blocks. Do you have a domain with sliver triangles or highly skewed quads? The associated block will also have similar issues. Resolve problems at the foundation first and the quality of the volume cells will follow suit.

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

It’s hard to pick just one place.  I love good food of all types.  If you were looking for some tasty beef barbeque, I would have to tell you go to my favorite spot in town, Cousin’s.  If you are in the mood for a mind-blowing burger, go to Lili’s and have their house burger smothered in gorgonzola.  For a nice romantic Italian dinner, Piola’s is my favorite hands-down.  It’s in a tiny little house near West 7^th and has a great atmosphere.  As a foodie, one thing that I love about Fort Worth is the selection of restaurants we have in town and the quality of the food.  It’s hard to go wrong with any place you pick.  Come, visit, eat and enjoy Cowtown!

Jim Colby, Senior Engineer on the Product Development Team.

While originally from Illinois (Waukegan for you Jack Benny fans), I grew in foggy Santa Maria, CA. So, I know BBQ – specifically Santa Maria Style BBQ and even helped my dad build a ‘spec’ Santa Maria BBQ pit. Even with that, I have come to appreciate Texas BBQ (see below).

My early career plans centered around becoming a naval officer on a fleet ballistic missile or fast attack nuclear submarine. So, at UCLA, I first majored in nuclear engineering. When I learned from my roommate that the Navy doesn’t like non-Naval Academy nuclear engineers, I switched to mechanical engineering. When I found out I didn’t like mechanical engineering and found electrical engineering much easier, I switched again.  When I finally realized my severe motion sickness would be a problem, it was time for a land-based career.

I did get to work as a nuclear survivability engineer on the Navy’s Trident II missile at Lockheed for a number of years. Running bomb codes, testing electronics, analyzing EMP coupling of missile exhaust plumes and participating in an underground nuclear test were some of the fun things I got to work on while I taught myself C and C++. Ah, programming – now that was and is fun. Instant feedback, creating new code, making machines do my bidding – what’s not to like? I’ve worked on the system software for KLA-Tencor’s reticle inspection machines (front-end semiconductor manufacturing), Electroglas’ strip-test handler (back-end semiconductor manufacturing) and FEI’s focused ion beam microscopes (semiconductor failure analysis).

While at Lockheed, I completed a MS in Computational Physics, but didn’t use it much in the ensuing years. So, when a position opened up at Pointwise in 2010 (Carolyn Woeber, the Customer Support Manager here at Pointwise, is married to my wife’s brother), I jumped at the chance to work on a great scientific software package with great people.

• Location: Fort Worth, TX
• Current position: Senior Engineer, Product Development
• Current computer: Windows 8.1 workstation (Intel i7-860 2.80 GHz x 4, 16 GB, Dual Monitors, Nvidia GeForce GT 220), Filco mechanical keyboard (Cherry brown switches)
• Current headphones/amp: Oppo PM-3 w/FiiO X3ii
• One word that best describes how you work: Focused

What software or tools do you use every day?

While others might use imitators or pretenders, I use the one and only Emacs, the god of editors. As a colleague of mine once said, “Once you’re in Emacs, there’s no need to leave”. However, I do make concessions (I was an engineer first, then a physicist) so I also use Microsoft’s Visual Studio (with Emacs key bindings, of course). I can easily switch between Emacs for editing and Visual Studio for compiling, debugging and a bit o’ editing. The remapping of the keyboard I’ve done to make Windows more like a Sun workstation is handy as well and it confuses the heck out of people using my machine. We use Perforce for version control here at Pointwise, which is quite refreshing from my years under ClearCase’s somewhat heavy-handed version of version control. For issue tracking YouTrack is fantastic, and TeamCity manages our build system (18 build/test agents, each on a different OS platform). Cygwin works great for the command-line and for interfacing with our Linux- and Mac OS X-based machines. Outlook and Firefox/Chrome pretty much complete the list.

What does your workspace look like?

Jim’s current workspace.

Jim’s bookshelf.

My workspace is a bit, shall we say, crowded. Two monitors, phone, coffee mugs, planner, keyboard, assorted cables, phone/tablet/headphones, you get the picture, like the one above. On the wall is a nicely framed map of London, circa 1920. I also have a table behind me that takes up any overflow – more coffee mugs, books, magazines, water bottle, lunch bag – sorry, no picture.

What are you currently working on?

I was originally hired on to help with an Air Force contract integrating overset meshing capabilities into Pointwise. Nowadays it’s primarily getting V18 ready for production: addressing bugs, adding new features, expanding some existing features and testing.

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

That’s a great question. One for which I have an answer. None. I do build meshes while testing Pointwise in order to pin-point code defects, and if it’s not in the meshing algorithms, I’m all over it. Fortunately for me, there’s more to this world-class meshing tool than algorithms, and I get to help make those algorithms as useful as possible.

Any tips for our users?

You’ve made the best choice in CFD meshing software – unless you aren’t using Pointwise. Use it. Learn Glpyh. Make use of our awesome customer support – only the biggest customers received support directly from the developers at my previous employers – here at Pointwise, not only are our customer support engineers meshing experts, they are mere feet away from us developers and aren’t afraid to involve us should the need arise for any customer.

What project are you most proud of and why?

The overset meshing project I was originally hired for is certainly up there. I developed a nifty XML parsing engine that created user input dialogs at runtime so that future changes to the overset meshing codes we support would be nearly seamless. Some others would be the UV highlighter Examine function and Rules extensions (entity associations).

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

Well, as for CFD solvers, that would be the one I wrote. A fabulous 2D shock wave solver I wrote for a grad school homework assignment that only had one tiny error. Still got an A, though. Since then, I haven’t used any and don’t really need to with my current work.

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

Well, that’s classified. If I told you, I have to… you know. All kidding aside, I’m reading Geometry Modeling, by Michael Mortenson to get up to speed on, uh, geometry modeling.

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

I attended the C++Now conference last year and I’ll try to attend another C++ related conference this next year, and possibly another International Meshing Roundtable conference.

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

Time with my family is important since my kids are almost out of the house – we all climbed Half Dome in Yosemite National Park this past summer – I like to do it every 10 years. Cooking with my wife is always fun as we rarely eat out and rarely have the same meal twice – I’m the sous while she makes the meal magic. I also apparently enjoy keeping old laptop computers alive and living on Windows 10. I used to be addicted to pushups – my goal was to do 1,000 a day. But, I got stuck at 375 and gave up. These days, I run a few miles 2-3 days a week, and do a more modest 180 pushups and 36 pullups every other day to stay in shape for my real passion – coding for Pointwise.

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

Mesh early and often – wait – I get that confused with the ‘vote early and vote often’ quote… Since my career has only lately been CFD-related, I haven’t received any advice I’d call ‘best’. However, CFD analysis is probably like anything else – spend quality time up front on your project (i.e., build a great mesh with Pointwise) and the rest should just fall into place.

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

Café Pasqual’s in Santa Fe, NM. For BBQ, Franklin’s in Austin, TX is tough to beat, but be prepared to wait in line. For 3 hours. And do not fill up on their ‘samples’. In San Jose, CA, the Falafel Drive In is excellent – large falafel with their hot sauce and a banana shake. For steak, I still prefer Jocko’s in Nipomo, CA, just north of my home town – nothing fancy, just great steaks, beans and garlic bread.

Next week the aerospace community gathers in San Diego for AIAA SciTech 2016 (Science and Technology Forum and Exposition). If you’re going to be there and if you have questions about mesh generation for CFD (and who doesn’t) there will be plenty of Pointwise folks on-hand to help you.

Have questions about meshing with Pointwise? Travis Carrigan and Zach Davis will be available in booth 318 in the exhibit hall with answers to your questions including demonstrations of our latest meshing techniques.

Interested in learning about our research? Nick Wyman and Steve Karman from our Applied Research team will be roaming the technical sessions and Steve will be presenting his work with Mike Remotigue on Optimization-Based Smoothing for Extruded Meshes. The presentation will be during session MVC-01 on Thursday morning, 07 January, in the Nautical Room.

And yours truly will be in attendance, mostly trying to avoid answering hard questions about what exactly I do when I’m at work our development plan and schedule. (Hint: Version 18 is coming in 2016 with a vastly expanded suite of meshing tools. For example, see this article from The Connector.) But I’ll also be learning about advances in CFD from all of you to help refine my vision of meshing in the year 2030.

Hope to see you there.

Chris Fouts, Staff Specialist on the Product Development Team.

I guess you could say I’ve been working towards a career at Pointwise, Inc. since 1978. That’s when, growing up in the outskirts of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I learned to program using my first computer, a TRS-80 Model 1 with an astonishing 4 KB of memory. Yes, four kilobytes of memory. I still remember the excitement of upgrading it to 16 KB the following year.

My love for computers was eclipsed by my fascination with space exploration, though, so I trekked down to Atlanta to pursue a Bachelor of Aerospace Engineering degree at Georgia Tech a few years later. It didn’t take long for the practicality of a career in the slowly dwindling space program to become readily apparent, however. Fortunately, the warm comfort of a glowing cathode ray tube was still there to console me, so I merged the two interests by obtaining a master’s degree with a focus on CFD, also from Georgia Tech.

Upon graduating, I was hired by the CFD group at General Dynamics, Fort Worth Division. During the interview process, I remember being impressed with the people and the work there. Confidentially, though, I think the thing that really sold me was seeing the group playing “flight” on the Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) workstations over lunch time. That was my first time seeing “real-time” 3D graphics, and I was completely awestruck by it.

At GD/FW, I joined John Steinbrenner and John Chawner in developing the original Gridgen code. Rather, I should say the original Gridgen codes, since it was comprised of 5 separate programs at the time: Gridblock, Gridbound, Gridgen2D, Gridgen3D, and Gridvue3D. I was responsible for coding up the general architecture and graphics of the programs, while John and John did the heavier grid algorithm coding. It was at this time that I came up with the term “connector”, for better or for worse. Apparently, a fair number of people fall into the “worse” camp. Had I known that it would persist 30 years later, I might have given it a little more thought.

After the initial implementation of the Gridgen code base, I gave into the siren call of 3D graphics and took a job at SGI. I worked as a Systems Engineer providing pre-sales technical support for a few years (first in Dallas, then later in Atlanta) before finally joining the Inventor team as a developer. There I had a very small role in helping to shape and implement VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language), may it rest in peace. I also authored a number of games for the SGI platform that some SGI users might be familiar with: bz, vroom, oort, and pointblank.

In the meantime, John Chawner and John Steinbrenner had obtained the rights to the Gridgen code and formed Pointwise, Inc.  In 1999, as SGI was disintegrating, John and John graciously took me back into the fold. After a few years of coming back up to speed with the Gridgen code, I realized that the original Gridgen architecture was straining to keep up with the ever growing list of features. That triggered a multi-year effort to rewrite Gridgen as the Pointwise code you hopefully know and love today. My role in that process has been to focus primarily on the general architecture, the scripting interface, and, my favorite part, the 3D graphics.

• Location: Suwanee, GA
• Current position: Staff Specialist
• Current computer: Dell T3500 Workstation running Windows 7: Intel Xeon W3690 @ 3.47 GHz, 24 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive + 256 GB SSD, nVidia Quadro 5000, ASUS PB278Q 27” (2560×1440), ASUS VE248 24” (1920×1080), Deck Legend keyboard (Cherry MX Clear); Apple MacBook Pro Retina 15” (2880×1800) Mid-2015, Intel i7 @ 2.5 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, Intel Iris Pro + AMD Radeon R9 M370X.
• One word that best describes how you work: Engrossed

What software or tools do you use every day?

My primary development is performed on Windows, so Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2012 gets the bulk of my keystrokes. Test scripts in Glyph and development in Linux and OS X environments are all done in vim. Working from home, I use Pidgin to stay in touch with my co-workers. I use p4v to coordinate software changes with the rest of the development group. When I need to access the computers back in the Fort Worth office, I use TightVNC. Finally, Pandora keeps a steady stream of jazz funk and contemporary jazz going in the background.

What does your workspace look like?

Chris’s current workspace.

I have the good fortune of being able to work from home. My commute consists of walking down the stairs, with our cat posing the only traffic concern. Yes, I do get dressed for work every day, albeit with a casual dress code. My workspace is dim, as evidenced by the above picture (and that’s with the overhead light on, which is rarely the case). As such, I’m a big fan of backlit keyboards. My other favorite part of my office is my Steelcase Leap chair. Considering how much time I’ve spent in it over the years, it has definitely been a worthwhile investment. Like my desk, the rest of the office is pretty much chaos, but I do mostly know exactly where everything is.

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on new features that aren’t ready to be announced at this point, unfortunately. I can say that it is in support of the U.S. Air Force contract that Pointwise was awarded last year. The new functionality lays down the foundation for dealing with complex configurations that are not currently easily handled today, so I’m excited to see what our users will be able to do with it once it is released.

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

Since I do not spend much time actually generating meshes other than when testing or debugging an issue, I cannot really claim a specialty. The phase “Jack of all trades, master of none” really applies to me. If I was hard pressed to name one, though, I would go with automation. The same spatial abilities that help me with 3D graphics are useful when trying to encapsulate grid geometries in script commands.

Any tips for our users?

Embrace scripting. I see a lot of requests for new features that can be solved with a relatively simple script. While I recognize that a script is not quite as convenient as having an integral feature, the Glyph language can be used to add tailored functionality and to speed up repetitive tasks. The “tailored functionality” aspect of this cannot be oversold. When a new feature is requested, the actual implementation may be different is some ways from the original request (due to a large number of factors). With a script, you can control exactly how you want the operation to behave based on your unique needs.

What project are you most proud of and why?

First, I’m extremely proud of how Pointwise has turned out. It was a big undertaking to rewrite the Gridgen code from scratch, but I couldn’t be more pleased with the product so far. I believe it has put us in a position to add new features much more quickly and easily than we could in the past.

For something more specific, I’m proud of how the Undo feature was implemented. One of the common approaches to add undo capabilities is to write a reverse operation for every operation that is created. For something like grid generation where you have complex non-linear operations involved, that just is not practical. Instead, we were able to tie into the main mechanism used internally to propagate changes between entities. Since this communication has to happen regardless of undo, we get undo capability for minimal effort. This speeds up the development process in adding new operations since we do not have to take time to develop a matching reverse operation.

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

To be honest, I never run solvers or postprocessors. Since my focus is on the general architecture of the code, I leave the “science” side of the code to my much more capable colleagues.

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

I’m not reading anything CFD- or coding-related at the moment. I’m currently reading “Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness” by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner. It’s an interesting and approachable discussion of the relationship between consciousness and quantum physics. It is actually pretty unsettling on several levels. You should probably just forget that I said anything about it.

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

I currently have no plans for any technical conferences this year. I admit I am pretty much a hermit when it comes to work which is why telecommuting is such a good fit for me. I like to focus on the solution with as little distraction as possible. Invariably, when I go to conferences, I enjoy the first day and then spend the rest of the time wanting to get back to work on something I thought of on that first day. I do have plans to attend a few Atlanta-based conventions for board gaming, which ties into the next question.

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

When I’m not writing code to help other people generate meshes or basking in my lovely wife’s company, I’m probably gaming in one form or another. If it’s not tennis with the neighborhood team (every neighborhood in Atlanta has a tennis team) or video games, I’ll be gathering with friends once or twice a week to play board games. There is a huge selection of games beyond Monopoly and Clue that most people aren’t aware of.

My favorite game at the moment is Pandemic Legacy, a co-operative game in which the players act as a team of specialists trying to prevent a world-wide outbreak of four diseases. Think of it as team-based solitaire, but with an engrossing theme and much more interesting decisions to be made. Each play results in modifications to the game itself that are carried over into future plays. It is structured as a season of games, much like a television series. It even includes plot twists to the collaborative story we’re playing out. The result is unlike any gaming experience I’ve ever had.

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

“Stop. Just stop. Let somebody else do it.” – Unknown

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

My wife and I eat out so infrequently (my wife is a great cook) and there are so many restaurants in the Atlanta area that we seldom go to a restaurant multiple times. If it’s a special occasion, though, I would pick Pampas here in Atlanta or Eddie V’s in Fort Worth. Both have served some of the best steaks I’ve ever eaten. At the complete opposite end of the scale, my wife and I really enjoy getting wraps at Roly Poly.

CD-adapco + Siemens

One billion dollars [approx.] is an attention-getting amount of money.

The biggest CFD news of the week which you’ve all probably heard already was Siemens’ purchase of CD-adapco for $970 million (approx. 5x revenue). CD-adapco will be added to Siemens’ Digital Factory Division, specifically their PLM software line.

• Industry analyst Monica Schnitger wrote about the deal here and here (from Siemens’ Analyst Call).
• DEVELOP3D wrote about the transaction here. There’s an interesting line in their article that I’ll quote here: “The CFD market is one that’s seeing a lot of action at the entry level – we’ve seen a number of start-ups come online in the last few months. But as ever, the real money to be made in CFD is at the high-end.”
• It’s on HPC-Wire and Bloomberg and TenLinks.

ANSYS, Exa, and now CD-adapco are publicly traded companies. I’m interested in your opinions on what that means for the rest of the vendors in the CFD market, especially the independents.

ANSYS 17.0

Our friends at ANSYS released ANSYS 17.0 with the tagline “Excellence Times 10” and featuring improvements across their entire suite of tools. Specifically for CFD, this software update includes UI enhancements, meshing improvements (see image below), robustness improvements for conjugate heat transfer, 90% efficient scalability to 129,000 cores, and more.

• Read what Desktop Engineering has to say about ANSYS 17.0.
• Read what TenLinks has to say.
• Watch ANSYS’ teaser video about 17.0.

This surface mesh was generated by Volvo using ANSYS 17.0’s automatic scripting capabilities. Image by Volvo from ANSYS. See link above.

Events

• SAVE THE DATE: The Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016 will be held 21-22 September in Fort Worth.
• Flow Science announced the 16th FLOW-3D European Users Conference will be held in Krakow, Poland on 14-16 June 2016. The call for abstracts is now open with a due date of 22 April.
• The call for papers for the NAFEMS Americas Conference 2016 (7-9 June, Seattle) is open but the abstract deadline of 31 January is rapidly approaching.
• The CONVERGE Combustion Summit will be in Nice, France on 04 May 2016.
• The modeFRONTIER International Users’ Meeting will be held on 17-18 May 2016 in Trieste, Italy.

News & Jobs

• “The internet’s favorite fluid dynamics blog,” FYFD, has launched a subscription campaign as the start of many new things coming in 2016 because the site’s author, Dr. Nicole Sharp, will be working on FYFD “full-time.”
• You could win a quadcopter drone in Tecplot’s 2016 Plot Contest. Your plots are due by 31 March.
• There’s a contract position for a CFD Engineer in the Detroit area.
• Foam-U is advertising a PhD position in LES modeling of atomization.

Applications

• Here’s part 3 of a series of articles on CFD and DCIM (data center information management) in which the term “the Tetris effect” is introduced. See image below.
• [Sweet, rich, creamy] CFD for dairy products via Software Cradle.

Example of using CFD for data center thermal management. Image from The Data Center Journal. See link above.

Software

• OpenCFD released OpenFOAM v3.0+. (From their website, “OpenFOAM+ uses the OpenFOAM Foundation version as a common code base, and offers wider functionality and platform support.”) This new release includes updates in meshing, physical models, and more.
• Autodesk Meshmixer 3.0 was announced. [I infer nothing from the broken image link on that web page.]
• GridPro v6.5 was released with UI and automation improvements. (See image below.)
• Flow Science released FLOW-3D/MP 6.1, the HPC version of FLOW-3D.
• OpenVSP 3.5.1 was released for parametric aircraft geometry.
• I’ve just learned about ANAMESH, meshing software from French company Lemma.

Submarine grid in GridPro v6.5. Image from PDC. See link above.

Unstructured Abstraction

An exhibition celebrating the 80th anniversary of the group American Abstract Artists is a showcase of “the continued relevance and vitality of art that communicates directly through the eye, reaching our intellect and our emotions without words.”

Joanne Mattera, Chromatic Geometry 22, 2015. Image from artist’s website. See link above.

We are now accepting resumes for engineering internships on our technical support, product development, and applied research teams.

You can read the full announcement on our jobs page.

Applying for an internship is easy:

1. Read the announcement.
2. Choose which team best matches your interests and goals.
3. Email your resume to jobs@pointwise.com.

So that you might better understand our expectations, you might also want to read articles we’ve posted about resumes and hiring.

• The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Resumes
• Interns, Resumes, and My Sanity
• Why You Didn’t Get a Job Offer
• The Worst Resume Ever
• Four Tips for the Job Seeking Student

[Looking back on that list of articles it’s clear I need to write one that approaches the topic from a more positive perspective. Cranky? Who, me?]

Keep this in mind. We love our interns. They’ve done great work for us in the past and we’re certain summer 2016 will be the same. Help us find you. Apply today.

Rose Mary Crager, Manager of the Business & Administrative Services Team.

Throughout my career, I have worked for a criminal attorney for several years, in the corporate office of a finance company, DeVry University, and now Pointwise. My career at Pointwise began 8 years ago. Today I am the Manager of our Business and Administrative Services team.

Raising a family put my desire to obtain a degree on hold until my girls were grown and married. Once the last one was married, I decided to go back to school and get my Bachelor’s degree. With my love of computers, I decided to enroll in the Computer Science degree program at DeVry University. While taking classes at DeVry, an administrative position supporting the General Education and Electronics Deans came open and I was offered the position. Working at DeVry was enjoyable because I had contact with all the professors and the deans were all very supportive of their staff. Since I was working full time, there was no way to take a full schedule of classes so some of the classes I needed were discontinued and other classes added. To graduate with a Computer Science degree seemed impossible. At this point, I talked to the Business Administration Dean and she was able to transfer all my class credits into the Business Administration program so I was able to graduate with my Bachelor’s Degree within the time frame originally planned.

I’ve been very blessed to find a company like Pointwise as my employer. The company is employee oriented and promotes from within. I’m included in the ranks of the non-meshers.

Beginning my career at Pointwise as an Office Administrator, my first task was to enter all our assets into our fixed asset program (FAS). Learning about the trade show assets was challenging, but everyone was very patient and help me understand how each of the trade show assets were used. In addition to learning FAS, I took care of all the invoicing, accounts receivables, accounts payable, and collections. During my tenure here, and with Carrie taking over more of the financial tasks, I’ve taken over more of the employee benefits and human resource tasks. Both of these fields are very interesting and with laws continually changing, very challenging.

As the manager of the BAS Team, my goal is to have each member of the team knowledgeable in all tasks assigned to the team. This way, each of us can help and know what to do if someone is out or unavailable.

• Location: Fort Worth, Texas
• Current position: Manager, Business & Administrative Services
• Current computer: Dell Precision T3500 (cracken) with 2 24” monitors
• One word that best describes how you work: Focused

What software or tools do you use every day?

Outlook, QuickBooks, Excel, Sage CRM, Word, and Fuzion Timecards.

What does your workspace look like?

Rose Mary’s current workspace.

Organized chaos.

What are you currently working on?

I process license requests daily. There are a lot of projects the BAS team coordinates, but currently we are researching a new software to help in calculating our direct and indirect rates for contracts; benefits renewals; coordinating the hiring of interns for the summer, and learning more about our new on-line training courses and how to process registrations.

What would you say is your specialty at Pointwise?

Accounting, Human Resources, and employee benefits.

What project are you most proud of and why?

Before we started using the Fuzion timesheet program, I took our manual timesheet process and automated it using Excel, Visual Basic, and macros. The program took all of the individual timesheets, compiled them into a Master then from the Master various reports could be run.

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

I love gardening, canning, crocheting, knitting, and reading. Right now I’m trying to get my garden spot ready for planting the spring garden.

Because I’m somewhat a naturalist, gardening and having my own fresh veggies to can and freeze is very enjoyable. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but once everything is done, standing back and looking at everything on the shelf is rewarding.

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

Any job worth doing is worth doing right.

North America’s Largest 3-D Printed Structure Started as a Mesh

While the folks at Pointwise appreciate the beauty and utility of grids, usually the computational meshes produced by our software are used as an intermediate step in a customer’s engineering analysis process and not as the final goal of the project. However, Branch Technology, with its novel freeform 3-D printing techniques actually turns these meshes into physical structures that can be used as building elements or as seen here, works of art. (more)

Unstructured Quad/Hex Meshes and Mesh Sizing Sources Coming to Pointwise

Pointwise V18 is about to enter the beta testing phase and is on track for release later this year. We are excited about the new meshing capabilities coming in this release, including unstructured quadrilateral and hexahedral meshing and sources for simple control over mesh spacing in a tetrahedral volume mesh, so we are providing a sneak preview here. Read on to find out more about these and other new features coming soon to Pointwise. (more)

Revisiting Output-Based Mesh Adaptation

Mesh adaptation techniques in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications have matured substantially over the years, yet still few people seem to be leveraging them to their advantage. In this article, some background on why you should be using mesh adaptation to make sure important flow features are resolved without an inordinately large overall cell count is presented along with an example using Pointwise and NASA’s FUN3D solver. (more)

Gridgen Approaching Retirement

Not many of us get to retire at 42 years of age, but for a computer program that is a long life. Consider that when Gridgen development began in 1984, it was on a VAX 11/780 computer and a DEC VT240 graphics terminal. Gridgen was groundbreaking software, but it has been far surpassed by Pointwise. So the time has come to announce that effective six months after the release of Pointwise V18, Gridgen will no longer be supported or maintained. (more)

Yesterday I was a guest of the AIAA Management Technical Committee [oxymoron?] for their meeting at the University of Texas at Arlington where the topic was Integrating the Small Supplier into the Aerospace & Defense Supply Chain.

It was a very interesting and enjoyable meeting with a great exchange of information and discussion in the spirit of sharing (rather than finger-pointing up and down the supply chain). The committee was very welcoming and seemed to appreciate my participation.

I won’t name names but the TC’s membership includes high level people from all types of aerospace organizations, from contractors to government agencies and everything in between.

What’s a Small Business?

Small is a qualitative term. The Small Business Administration (SBA) defines small as fewer than 500 employees. To me that’s large.

For some purposes, 1,000 employees can still be considered “small.” To me that’s very large.

You can be a division of a publicly-traded company and still be considered small. I don’t get that.

Sometimes the definition of SME or SMB (small and medium sized enterprises or businesses) leaks into the discussion and I don’t know how high the head count goes for a medium sized biz.

To me, 50 or fewer employees is small.

While it’s hard to quantify exactly what a small business is, we agreed that we could classify businesses as small by certain behaviors that they exhibit and the challenges those behaviors represent.

In all fairness to both parties, large organizations exhibit some of these problems too. And small businesses problems are often caused by (benign) ignorance. [And then there’s not knowing what you don’t know.]

The Significance of Small Businesses

It’s important to integrate small businesses with large organizations for many reasons.

• Small businesses hold more patents than all universities and large corporations combined.
• They create 2/3 of all private sector jobs.
• They employ half of all working Americans.
• Since 1995, they have created 64% of all new jobs.
• Since 1995, they have paid 44% of all private payroll.

From the standpoint of the A&D supply chain, small businesses are advantageous in many ways.

• Prices are lower (probably due to the lack of overhead)
• They are responsive and flexible (to a degree)
• They have fewer issues with contract terms and conditions (although this is a double-edged sword)

So What’s The Problem?

In my opinion (and echoed by some of the committee’s members), the challenges that arise when small companies work with large organizations are due to three factors:

• incomplete communication
• lack of knowledge
• limited capacity

View From The Top

Large organizations cited these problems when dealing with small companies. (There is no ranking implied by the order of listing below.)

• Products don’t meet published specifications (e.g. just copied the spec of a competing product)
• Unrigid, non-urgent delivery schedules (e.g. commercial customers, often with larger orders, take priority)
• Changes to the product are not documented (e.g. change vendors on a component)
• The origin of products or components (e.g. parts made in China)
• You sometimes get the B-Team (e.g. because their A-Team is busy working with another customer)
• Inadequate staffing and procedures, esp. outside of engineering (e.g. proposals and billing are haphazard)
• Trust issues (e.g. don’t want to share info, even under an NDA)
• Lack of facilities (e.g. can’t test everything to verify the product’s performance envelope)
• Lack of expertise (e.g. unable to perform FEA)
• Don’t analyze the root cause of failures (e.g. just replace parts on fail)
• Cannot survive a break in production (e.g. need continuous cash flow)
• No failure reporting or documentation (e.g. fixes during testing don’t make their way into production parts)
• Lack of consistent repeatable processes (e.g. changes in personnel often result in changes in product performance and delivery)
• Unable to rapidly scale up (e.g. cannot meet a surge in orders)
• Dependency on key personnel (e.g. when “Bill” leaves, all is lost)

View from the Bottom

The reason they invited me was to hear directly from a small business owner about the challenges we face when working with large organizations. [They found me via AIAA headquarters who knew that Pointwise was an AIAA corporate member.]

I opened with one of my favorite quotes: “Owning a small business is like agreeing to be punched in the face for a living.” I don’t recall the origin of that quote, but when I share it with other small business owners I get nods and wry smiles in return.

My presentation was then split into three parts: working with the U.S. Government specifically, working with large organizations in general, and just some miscellaneous feedback.

The Challenges of Working for Uncle Sam

When it comes to doing R&D contracting, we find that the 4-letter government agencies that administer and manage contracts are not well suited for dealing with either small organizations or R&D (as opposed to manufacturing).  The same procedures apply to the top airframe manufacturer and the small business. That’s incredibly inefficient for the latter. Also, you can be certain the top airframe manufacturer gets all their attention meaning we get very little, even when just a little attention is all  we need to get things moving.  Here you should note that this is the flip side of the complaint that small businesses don’t have the labor capacity to respond to surges. It appears Uncle Sam lacks that capability too.

I don’t think anyone would disagree when I say that having to wait four years to get the final payment on an R&D contract is an undue financial burden. Nor do I think anyone will disagree how disruptive it is when an auditor keeps all our financial statements in the trunk of her car for months during tax season.

One of our observations is that there don’t appear to be any rules, just the opinion of the last person who looked at your paperwork. You’ll notice that this echoes the observation that small businesses are dependent on key personnel. The same appears to be true for Uncle Sam.

The Challenges of Working with Any Large Organization

Purchasing portals and third party purchasing agencies are especially troublesome for small businesses. While I don’t doubt they simplify things for the large organization, they are mostly undecipherable, undocumented, and unsupported labyrinths of online pain for the small business. There is rarely anyone who a) you can contact and b) can give you a definitive answer.

As a software business in particular, we are faced with terms and conditions in purchase orders that only apply to the purchase of tangible objects (e.g. “Do you use any toxic chemicals in your manufacturing process?”) and have nothing to do with licensing software for which there are no tangible deliverables. Having to read lengthy Ts and Cs is not the best use of our time, let alone the delays caused by asking to have some of them struck.

So why do we bother to read Ts and Cs in the first place? Because they contain onerous tidbits like these that we will NEVER agree to.

• Identify all your employees who used to work for us.
• Give us your financial statements for the four prior years.
• Agree to abide by our ethics policy.

And here’s the flip side of negotiating a purchase order. We (the small business) have rights and responsibilities too and in our case we want the large organization to agree to the Right to Use License for our software. Their often adamant refusal to do so is problematic to say the least.

Of course, it’s because they fear having to get LEGAL involved in the purchase. [Cue Darth Vader music.]

Other Issues

Without going into the details, the issue of ITAR-controlled articles was discussed (i.e. International Traffic in Arms Regulations). Unfortunately, some engineers at large organizations don’t know what’s ITAR-controlled and what’s not. When they share that data with us, the small business, how are we supposed to know and take the appropriate action?

Summarizing the Challenges

Business transactions between organizations of (vastly) different size pose several challenges, that are often two sides of the same coin.

• Incomplete Communication: Large organizations fail to make their expectations clear to small businesses. And small businesses often fail to disclose important information to their large business customers.
• Lack of Education: Small businesses lack certain skills or expertise that are often necessary for completing transactions with large businesses. But large businesses often fail to provide the small business with the necessary guidance or platforms tailored to the small supplier.
• Limited Capacity: Small businesses often lack the personnel, systems, skills, or cash flow to work with large businesses in the manner they’re used to being worked with. And large businesses lack the personnel, systems, and skills to accommodate the needs of small businesses.

Dr. Michael Remotigue, Engineering Specialist on the Product Development Team.

I grew up in Fairfield, OH, a bedroom community of Cincinnati.  I’m the second oldest of four brothers.  My father is Filipino and my mother is German.   It was the summer after my freshman year of college when I met my wife, Robyn, from a close friend, when I was actually on a blind date setup by my older brother.  We dated through college and married right after she graduated.  We have two boys, Aaron and Ethan, and they were born in Mississippi.

I received my B.S. of Engineering Mechanics from the University of Cincinnati in 1986.  To be honest, engineering was not my first choice of vocation, initially I was thinking of becoming a veterinarian.  My late father practiced Family Medicine and my brothers and I found many of our days going to the hospital and waiting in the doctors’ lounge till he finished his rounds.  I ended up perusing through the medical journals and books.  Mainly the pictures and drawings were eye opening, amazing, and disgusting.  Who really reads them for the articles?  I eventually became desensitized and very clinically minded, I just thought animals would not argue as much and be better patients, plus they are just cuter.  I was accepted at Purdue and another college I can’t remember, but chose to attend The Ohio State University.  The spring of 1981, I changed my mind after attending an orientation at OSU.  At that moment, it just dawned on me that after four years of study, I would not be marketable until I actually completed another four years of vet school.  I did not want that much school.  Little did I know at that point what my true aspirations were.  After that fateful day, I scrambled to decide on what I wanted to study and where, before I graduated high school.  It was a toss-up between Aerospace and Mechanical.  At the time, UC offered a B.S. in Engineering Mechanics, out of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, that allowed for additional unspecified engineering electives that the other degrees did not offer.  I saw that as an opportunity to allow for exploration in various engineering courses.

In 1983, it was during my first of five co-ops at Eglin AFB, FL that I got my introduction to the field of mesh generation and CFD when I met Profs. Joe Thompson and Wayne Mastin during one of their many visits where they were working on a new mesh generation code called EAGLE.  On my third and remaining co-ops, I managed to get into the CFD group headed by Dr. Lawrence Lijewski and used EAGLE to create meshes, submit CFD runs over a telephone modem, and also helped develop and maintain a visualization tool.   It was exciting to work next to and get educated by these people who ultimately steered my studies at UC.

Upon graduation, I hired on at General Dynamics in Fort Worth, TX and was assigned to the CFD group headed by Ishwar Bhately, where I met Chawner, Steinbrenner, Fouts, Matus, and Karman.  I tweaked and used Gridgen and ran CFD analysis on different projects like the National Aero-Space Plane (NASP), F-16, A-12 and YF-22.   I did a lot of complaining to the development team back then when I encountered bugs.  I was also responsible to bug fix and compile the flow-field visualization packages provided by NASA, Plot3D/Real3D, when new updates came and to also develop a plotting package to display data in various graphs.  After the A-12 cancellation in January 1991 I was released and I focused on finishing my M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington, which I completed later that fall.   What should have been a downturn in a career, turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  It so happened, that my M.S. advisor, Prof. David Thompson ran into Joe Thompson at an AIAA conference that year.  Thompson was looking for new graduates to help staff the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERC) at Mississippi State University (MSU) and he remembered me and requested that I send him a resume.

Before I was allowed to take the job, Robyn insisted that I show her where Starkville, MS was on the map.  When I arrived, my initial task was to continue the development and training of EAGLE, but eventually with another colleague, Dr. Michael Stokes, we developed a graphical user interface version called EAGLEView that allowed graphical manipulation of the geometry and mesh, active selection, used popup dialogue boxes to capture selections and required inputs to generate the script language of EAGLE, record the commands, and display the results from EAGLE on the screen.  After a year passed, I started my Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at MSU one-class-at-a-time and concurrently EAGLEView matured and became a viable “free” mesh generator, but one drawback became apparently clear, the geometry representation was a spline of discrete data points.  There was a push to describe the geometry accurately and actually have the mesh represent the model to a tighter tolerance.

In 1993, I joined a team of developers and academics to create a new software product called the National Grid Project (NGP) that addressed the need to mesh directly on imported CAD data via the use of Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) and it was to be able to create multi-block structured and unstructured meshes in the same system using the same geometry model tied together by a solid modeling data structure.  After two years of development, the software was never released due to stability and robustness issues, but Brian Jean and I were given a terminal mandate to at least demonstrate it’s potential.  Brian Jean was in charge of developing and stabilizing the underlying NURBS data structure and related utilities library, which was called ATLAS.  I was in charge of everything else. In 1996, I stuck my neck out again, and maybe stretched Brian’s a bit, by arguing that I could salvage a structured code within a year.  We needed something to replace EAGLEView and fast.  It was lagging behind since all my time was being focused elsewhere.   The research faculty and staff were not getting the required geometric fidelity needed for their CFD simulations.

We were successful; the resulting software was called GUM-B (General Unstructured Multi-Block).  GUM-B was used in-house at the ERC and “given” to various companies, government labs, and universities.   An additional tool called GUMBO (General Unstructured Multi-Block Omnitool) was developed shortly after, and it allowed multi-block structured grids to be read in and pre-processed for the various CFD solvers that were used in-house and by our users.  I desperately wanted to use the acronym POKI, but just could not figure out a decent description.  Inside GUMBO, the assigned boundary conditions and connectivity were tracked and copied as needed during splitting, merging and transformations.  It became a valuable front end to TURBO, the parallel turbo-machinery code, developed at the ERC and provided to industry, academia and NASA Glenn.

When I received my Ph.D. in 1999, I hired on as an Assistant Research Professor in the SimCenter at MSU, which was later merged into the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) SimCenter.  In addition to maintaining and developing GUM-B, GUMBO, and teaching an occasional class, I took on the responsibility to maintain and develop the unstructured sister code, SolidMesh, which was developed by Adam Gaither.  The codes were developed using the same geometry, graphics, and GUI libraries.  The topology data structure was similar but it was less rigid.  Just the mesh generation algorithms were different.  However, that quickly changed when I started adding the structured algorithms into SolidMesh.

Later as an Associate Research Professor and before I left MSU, I was developing SolidMesh++ (SM++), which would have a journaling/scripting capability, OpenGL support, a stand-alone API library capable for rapid software integration, and a customizable GUI.  SM++ was used in designing an urban modeling system, BlastScape which generated a simplistic geometric description of buildings or obstructions and the blast information which was imported into MeshScape, which automatically generated either structured or unstructured meshes for the farfield, the nearfield, the overset mesh around the prescribed geometries and a hemisphere for the blast description.  SM++ was also used to rapidly generate 100s of blast-soil mesh cases, which were created by using a Voronoi diagram from random points.  The Voronoi regions represented soil particles and were “exploded” at various time scales.  Only those particles that where within a prescribed expanding unit square where used and the exposed gaps where meshed.  The grids were used to calibrate the blast model.  The full functionality of the SM++ API was never completely integrated into a GUI before I left.

Sadly, research funding is not guaranteed in academia and as things were becoming tight, I decided that a change of scenery was needed and I reached out to Pointwise, my first choice.  In August 2012, I joined the Pointwise team and worked remotely for a year so Aaron could graduate high school.  Now I’m in Fort Worth and enjoying every day.  The one thing that makes me excited is that the software has a lot of potential to add new features and capabilities.  The CAD import, solver export, technical support, training, documentation, and marketing and sales capabilities of Pointwise Inc. are what I dreamed I had for my software.   Pointwise is very similar in concept to the software that I developed, but it is more complex, software engineered, and has more tools to make quality meshes.  This is the NGP concept.  There has been a lot of thought and development that allows both the structured and unstructured capabilities to co-exist, work seamlessly together, and still create a quality mesh.  A blessing for me is that I just focus on the bug fixing, research and development, which has been relaxing and less stressful.   Maybe I should not mention it here; much to the delight of the family, I don’t bring my work home with me as often.

• Location: Fort Worth, TX
• Current position: Engineering Specialist, Product Development
• Current computer: iMac 27” Retina 5K Display, 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, 3.3 GHz Intel Core i5, OS X El Capitan, AMD Radeon R9 M290 2048 MB, Hewlitt Packard 27” HP2711x monitor (1080×1920), wired keyboard with numeric keypad, magic mouse
• One word that best describes how you work: Methodical

What software or tools do you use every day?

I’m old school when it comes to my text editor.  I’m like Michael Mirsky, Vim is my editor of choice.  I started using vi at Eglin AFB when I had to edit batch scripts at a remote sight across a dial-up modem and I have been using it ever since.  Just never really saw a need to change, just evolve.  I use Perforce for revision control.  Steve Karman and I are considered the misguided duo because we both use Mac OS X computers as our development platform.  They have proven many times over how temperamental they are, but I have grown accustomed to the idiosyncrasies.  My de facto debugger and compiler is Xcode.

What does your workspace look like?

Michael’s current workspace.

My cubical is located in the product development suite on the first floor by a window.  The window is key, because the time of year dictates if the ever-present fan or heater is in operation.  When I was remote, I bought a Herman Miller Mirra chair and an Anthro 48” Adjusta ergonomic computer desk on wheels, so I can move them around easily and occasionally work standing, and I now have at work.  I mounted a 4 port usb 3.0 hub to the front underside of the fixed desk to allow flexibility to plugin external drives and flash drives and a power strip on the back metal plate.  Stealing an idea from Michael Mirsky, I mounted my 27” monitor in portrait mode next to the iMac, which is used to display mail, messages, browser, and Xcode.  I mounted it this way so I could have the iMac positioned in front of me, where I run Pointwise and text edit, and only glance at the portrait monitor as needed.

My desk is my sanctuary; it is what I would call organized chaos.  What ever the current project is I’m working on, the associated papers, books and notes get piled on it until the task is done.  I would be deeply amiss if I did not mention how I isolate myself from the ever-present pedestrian and traffic noise that comes through the window.  My Audeze EL-8CB headphones, Audioengine N22 amplifier, iPod classic (loaded with Jazz, Rock-N-Roll, Metal, Pop, Alternative, and Christian Rock), and LG G Pad 7.0 (streaming Sirius/XM, CNN, or ESPN) help isolate and tune out the noise of the outside world and the consistent clicking of keyboards.

What are you currently working on? 

Fixing bugs in Pointwise V18, but most recently trying to improve the unstructured normal extrusion and structured algebraic & hyperbolic extrusion algorithms.   The most recent issue is the instability of the structured normal extrusion in regions where a singularity is present, and I have been determining how to detect the divergence and correct the problem.

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

My introduction into the field was multi-block structured meshing, but developed tools to read, process, and generate CAD geometry.  Eventually I ventured into unstructured mesh generation.  Overall, my specialty has been to integrate mesh generation tools, functionality, and utilities into a graphical user interface system.

Any tips for our users?

In Pointwise V18, the unstructured normal extrusion functionality and options have changed.  Some corrections are also being done to the structured hyperbolic and algebraic extrusions to help robustness.  There will definitely be a change in the grid, but hopefully the results will be a better quality mesh like I have been seeing in my tests.

What project are you most proud of and why? 

In the soon to be released Pointwise V18, the join unstructured blocks capability was a fun and interesting project.  Not only did it help me understand the code, but also it gives me great satisfaction when I know it will be a useful tool for the user.  Programming the functionality helped me learn about the different block topology data structures and many other aspects of the Pointwise software and its infrastructure.  I like a challenge and figuring out the science that has gone into the development of Pointwise is one and I’m highly impressed by the computer science that is used and how some of the mesh generation algorithms are refactored.

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

The last CFD solvers that I used were the research codes developed at MSU.  I haven’t had a need to use one since joining Pointwise, but I have used Tecplot, FieldView, and ParaView to visualize the mesh.  I now mostly view the mesh in Pointwise V18.

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

I have not been reading anything new at this moment.  I have been refreshing my knowledge of hyperbolic mesh generation, by reviewing “Hyperbolic Methods for Surface and Field Grid Generation”, William M. Chan, Handbook of Grid Generation, Eds. Thompson, Soni, Weatherill, CRC Press and A Generalized Scheme for Three-Dimensional Hyperbolic Grid Generation, William M. Chan and Joseph L. Steger, AIAA-91-1588-CP.

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

May attend AIAA Aviation or the International Meshing Roundtable.

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

When not at work, my time is spent with church, family, projects and hobbies.   I am active at Arborlawn United Methodist church and Ethan’s youth group at Genesis United Methodist church.   I’m also on the Troop Committee of Ethan’s Boy Scout troop and go camping when I can.    Aaron already received his Eagle Scout, but he is now in Austin attending the University of Texas, which we frequently visit.  Other family travels have taken us to Yellowstone National Park and Mt. Rushmore, the Big Island of Hawaii, and most recently a trip to the San Jose/San Francisco area to visit family.

Robyn understands that before we call a repairman and if it is not under warranty, I will try to diagnose the problem myself and then make the assessment to see if it is something I could do.  If it requires a tool and I don’t have it, I would buy it or rent it.  I like home projects and the satisfaction I did it myself; for example, I did renovations to our house in Mississippi, like installing bamboo flooring, tiling, detailed trim work, painting, plumbing, electrical re-wiring for new light fixtures, installing a stove/oven and dishwasher, and building a built-in entertainment center. The one thing I will not do is wallpaper.  I just do not have the patience to install it.  We moved into a nine year-old house in Texas, so my projects have been minor home improvements and repairs. I added additional interior lights, replaced the sled on the garage track, rewired the garage door when it came off track, replaced a hose on the washing machine, replaced a broken exterior light receptacle, and replaced a light switch.   Robyn does see some painting in my near future.

One of my hobbies is related to my project interest, since I need another excuse to use my tools, I have made a bench, a bookcase, and floating shelves.  I’ve also been the self-designated photographer at both of my son’s school activities and provided the pictures to the parents and the school yearbook.  Last year I upped my game by purchasing a new 24 MP Nikon DSLR with 5 frames per second and a 28-300mm telephoto lens.  I’m also a self-proclaimed audio/videophile and have a collection of music and movies on disc and digital as well as vinyl records, that I play on my 7.1 stereo system composed of Paradigm speakers, Denon components, Apple TV, Roku, and a 64” Samsung 3D plasma TV.  The system has taken me 15 years to assemble.  I do prefer to watch movies at home than in the theater.

I also have a collection of 200+ die-cast miniature cars.  Majority of them are Matchbox superfast cars, I liked these cars since they were less futuristic and resembled actual car models.  Recently, I haven’t been actively collecting them, especially after Mattel acquired them.  It was difficult to find models without flashy paint and unrealistic modifications.  My oldest car is about 1969 and I have a few with a cracked windshield and nicks in the paint.  I have a small collection of Matchbox Premier Series models along with my Gumby and Pokey figurines on my file cabinet at work.

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

The best advise or visual was from Prof. Joe Thompson when he first explained the concept of multi-block structured meshing to a naïve co-op at Eglin AFB – If you visualize each block like a sponge and if you can fit it in the field to model your geometry, then you should be able to grid it.  What an eye opener that concept was and that sparked an interest in this new field of study.

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

My absolute go to restaurants would be the Montgomery Inn Boathouse and any Skyline Chili in Cincinnati, OH.  Our family eats there every time we go home to visit relatives.  We also travel through Starkville, MS regularly and we frequent The Little Dooey, Newks, and City Bagel while there.  Locally in Fort Worth, Cousins BBQ, Saltgrass Steak House, and 3 Parrots Taco Shop are favorites.  Personally I like sushi, the family not so much, but Sushi Axiom is one of my choices.  But to be honest, I do prefer my cooking overall.

Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016

Come join us in Fort Worth, Texas on 21-22 September for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016. The call for papers is open (due date is 01 July) – this is your opportunity to share your CFD work and the Pointwise meshes you used.

Software

• CFMS will participate in the UK’s Hyperflux++ project which aims to create the next generation of CFD tools using high order methods.
• CONSELF Cloud CFD v2.0 was released with new features such as vertical apps, cut cell hex meshing, and improved BC setup.
• CONSELF also explains common CFD terms.
• ENGINEERING.com writes about improvements to the Cartesian meshing in FloEFD v15.
• And Desktop Engineering interviewed Mentor Graphics’ manager for the aerospace and defense market on how FloEFD serves CFD use in small and medium sized enterprises. “FloEFD’s solver is so stable that the designer would have to apply irrational boundary conditions for the solver to diverge and not come to a solution.”
• DEVELOP3D calls ANSYS “a simulation legend” in this article about Workbench R17.
• FEATool 1.4 (FEA toolbox for MATLAB) was released with major changes across the entire application.

Applications

This EnSight visualization of a CONVERGE model won Aimilios Sofianopoulus the cover of Stony Brook University Institute of Advanced Computational Science Annual Magazine. Image from CEI. Sorry, no URL.

• When modeling propellers in CAESES, there are handy tools for comparing blade sections.
• Speaking of marine hulls and propellers, HydroComp‘s software has new representation in China and Japan.
• Red Bull Formula 1 will continue to use ANSYS to simulate the aerodynamic performance of their cars (see image below).

ANSYS CFD simulation of a Red Bull Formula 1 car. Image from InsideHPC.com. See link above.

People & Events

• CD-adapco’s Steve MacDonald has been posthumously inducted into the Long Island Technology Hall of Fame.
• Syracuse University seeks a department chair for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
• ERCOFTAC presents CFD for Dispersed Multiphase Flows V, 13-14 June 2016, in Oslo, Norway.
• Amtec seeks a Fluid-Thermal-CFD engineer in San Jose, CA.

Computers and Computing

• If you missed the 2016 Stanford HPC Conference you can catch-up on exascale, the cloud, and more in their video gallery (including presentations from Rescale and UberCloud).
• Vulkan 1.0 is a “new generation graphics and compute API” for use with GPUs.
• A European consortium is working on ARM-based exascale computing.
• And Inside HPC also writes about some of the specific challenges of bringing HPC into the cloud.

Red Meshing

Red Painting (see below) may be my favorite of Mark Bradford’s works and not just because of its mesh-like appearance. However, just like meshing there are aspects of both order and chaos, process and automatism, surface and depth.

And he must be having a little fun with us because it’s not really a painting. It’s categorized as a mixed media collage. He layers on papers, pigment, and other materials and then works it over by scoring and sanding. Kinda like generating an initial mesh and then smoothing and refining it. (Did I take the meshing analogy one step too far?)

Mark Bradford, Red Painting, 2009. Click image for source.

Patrick Baker, Manager of the Product Development Team.

A native of Kansas City, MO, I spent the earliest part of my technical life hanging out with my dad at his office. Maybe it was the lure of technology that kept me going with him, or maybe it was to spend time away from my six sisters – too many tea parties and makeovers. My dad worked for the same civil engineering firm his entire life, primarily as a Fortran programmer who designed and implemented algorithms for bridge and highway systems that are still in use today. My interest in engineering and writing code is most assuredly tied directly back to him. My earliest memory of programming was, at age 12 or 13, writing a simple temperature converter in Fortran for a GE-600 series (I think) mainframe using punch cards and magnetic tape. I vividly remember the impressive and massive array of core memory, teletypes, high-speed card readers and paper and magnetic tape machines – it took up nearly have a floor in the office. There was an entire room of keypunch machines which produced an amazing volume of confetti. I think the sheer size and impression of power of that setup is what drew me in. Or maybe it was the confetti and the flashing lights.

I attended the University of Missouri-Rolla in the early 80’s earning a BS in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Computer Science and an emphasis on numerical methods for engineering. Looking back, I would have liked to continue with more education, but financial constraints required that I get a real job and off the family payroll (remember, six sisters, plus a brother by now, supported on an engineer’s salary).

Out of college, I was lucky enough to land a position as a wind tunnel test engineer at General Dynamics-Fort Worth Division where I had the opportunity to help design and test models for several advanced aircraft. It was here that I learned to love to code in C and work with Unix, writing routines for various data acquisition, reduction, analysis and archival systems. Lucky me again, the wind tunnel group was situated very close to the CFD group which is where I first met and became friends and occasional golf partners with John Chawner and John Steinbrenner. This is also where I came to realize, after only seven years, that wind tunnel testing was not the end for me, much like playing golf was not for John Chawner.

Since I wanted to explore programming more fully, after I left GD/FW in 1991, I spent about 15 years moving between consulting engagements, designing and writing code for advanced systems in natural gas trading, electric transmission scheduling, travel services, and one of the first multithreaded debuggers for hp-ux. I learned and became obsessive-compulsively proficient in the C/C++ and Java programming languages. I also learned how to properly classify a problem domain so that it could be turned into usable software. And oh, during this period, my wife decided to further her own career though education, while at the same time starting our family of two boys and a girl. All of this kept me moving around, but also opened up more opportunities to learn and grow professionally.

Also during this period is when Pointwise came into existence, initially offering Gridgen on Unix platforms only, but wanting to extend support to Windows. Fortunately for me, I had stayed in contact with Chawner and Steinbrenner and was offered the opportunity to port Gridgen as a consulting project. The main challenge of this was simply to get the existing code compiling with Microsoft compilers, followed by replacing an event loop here and there. So, I have the dubious distinction of being the first to see Gridgen run on Windows. The pride I may have felt about that quickly evaporated after I started full-time at Pointwise in 2007 and realized that virtually none of the code I added still remained. Thank you, Chris Fouts.

Since starting in 2007 as an Engineering Specialist, I’ve become the manager of the Product Development team. There are not enough good things I can say about my team and the rest of the staff here. These are easily the smartest and most fun people anybody could know, let alone work with daily. My philosophy toward personnel management is utopian: good people don’t need to be managed, just encouraged and supplemented with soda and snacks. The reality is, though, that everyone needs somebody to coach them along from time to time, even if it’s just a simple acknowledgment that they’re heading the right direction. That’s probably another thing I absorbed while spending so much time with my dad at work.

On an average day, I am probably interrupted 20 times for various things from virtually everyone on staff. But I like it that way. From responding to questions about the product plan or the product itself, to fixing bugs or reviewing code and requirements, I like to be involved both technically and non-technically in the advancement of the product and the company.

• Location: Fort Worth, TX
• Current position: Manager, Product Development
• Current computer: Windows 8.1
• One word that best describes how you work: Fragmented

What software or tools do you use every day?

gvim, Visual Studio, Perforce, Outlook, and Chrome.

What does your workspace look like?

Patrick’s current workspace.

I have a dual-monitor setup where I generally run administrative tools (Outlook, Chrome) on one, and edit code and run Pointwise on the other.

What are you currently working on?

The development team has been working on various features for the next major release of Pointwise for over a year and a half. Currently, we’re trying as hard as we can to get the code tested well enough to release a limited beta, followed closely by the general release.

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

I don’t have a meshing specialty, as the meshes I make are the simplest possible, intended to ensure that the various features of Pointwise work in a consistent, well-designed manner. In recent history, however, I have become most familiar with the inner workings of our unstructured surface mesher.

Any tips for our users?

Most of the nagging issues our customers face pertain to poorly defined or improperly sized geometry. So, if there’s any one tip I’d give to a user, it’s to obtain the cleanest geometry possible, and fix what isn’t clean in Pointwise, before starting the meshing process.

What project are you most proud of and why?

I don’t have any special feelings for any particular technical project over the course of my career. I’m not good at self-promotion; I had a difficult time just writing this article. If I have to choose something in my life to point at as a success, I’d say raising my kids to be humble and respectful but at the same time intelligent, independent thinkers.

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

I’ve never run a flow solver or postprocessor on anything but the most trivial cases. While the solution space interests me, it’s never really been a focus of mine since the development team works tirelessly at improving the mesher, and thus the mesh.

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

It’s been a while, but the last papers I reviewed with interest dealt with quadrilateral surface meshing. The authors and titles escape me.

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

I may attend AIAA Propulsion as a representative of Pointwise, mostly to man the booth and hear first-hand what kinds of problems and ideas customers are having.

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

When I’m not coding or coaching my team, I help my wife manage her business by doing the books, payroll and some of the IT. Beyond work, I enjoy an active life that includes about 75 rounds of golf per year, racquetball, and basketball (to the extent I can run with the younger players). We also like to travel and attend Broadway shows and concerts, although we don’t have as many opportunities to do those things as we’d like.

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

I’ll toe the company line and say that a good mesh might not lead to the ideal solution, but a bad mesh will always lead to a bad solution.

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

My favorite places all serve dry-aged cuts of beef. These include Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steak House or Capital Grille in downtown Fort Worth, and Fearing’s in the Ritz-Carlton near the Dallas Arts District. I really miss the old Blades restaurant that used to be downtown Fort Worth, which closed abruptly in 2005.

Applications

• Just in time for St. Patrick’s day beer drinking, COMSOL computes why bubbles rise in your glass of stout.
• Researchers at Johns Hopkins used CFD to study the wind conditions that make the 12th hole at Augusta National “the scariest 155 yards in golf.” [Not even CFD could save my golf game, as co-worker Pat Baker intimated in his This is How I Mesh profile.]
• Here are 10 new features in ANSYS 17.0 for aerospace simulation.
• A case study from Transvac on tank jet mixers.

Using the aerodynamics of 18-wheelers as an example, Symscape asks how we’re challenging orthodoxy with our use of CFD. Image from Symscape. Click image for article.

News from Pointwise

• Join us on o5 April for the webinar The Stanford Solar Car Project’s Race for Efficiency in which you’ll see how students used Pointwise for meshing, SU2 for flow solving, and Tecplot 360 EX for results extraction – a framework that helped them improve the aerodynamic efficiency of Arctan, their 6th place finishing vehicle.
• The call for papers is open until 01 July for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016, 21-22 September in Fort Worth. [Psst: The Meshy is coming.]
• Next Pointwise training course here in Fort Worth is 12-14 April.

CFD Podcasts and Videos

• The first three episodes of the new Talking CFD podcast are available on iTunes and Soundcloud. [Give it a listen.] [Edited to include link to iTunes.]
  • Episode 1: Your host, Robin Knowles of CFD Engine, introduces the series.
  • Episode 2: Paul Bemis, Coolsim
  • Episode 3: Wolfgang Gentzsch, UberCloud
• Dr. Peter Vincent answers the question What is CFD?

Simulation of Rayleigh-Benard Convection. Image from FYFD. Click [this very cool] image for article.

Geometry

• The new release of solidThinking Inspire 2016 introduces new technology that is reported to get optimized, generative designs back into CAD more quickly for manufacturing.
• ZJ Wang (Univ. of Kansas) announced the launch of meshCurve, software for elevating the polynomial degree of meshes.
• Here’s a nice overview of 3D-CAD in STAR-CCM+ v11.02.
• Looking for cloud-based, 3D modeling software based on subdivision surfaces? Check out Vectary, currently accepting applications for their early access program. [Now if only someone would explain the magic of Sub-D surfaces to me.]
• Cyborg3D is new 3D modeling software that combines Sub-D and NURBS.
• Kubotek reports back from the Design 2 Part event [held in the DFW area] and cites a battery-powered dog pooper scooper as best design.

Read and see how you can generate a parametric propeller blade model from imported surfaces. Image from caeses.com. Click image for article.

A Little Bit of Everything

• FEA for All asks and answers the question “Why does meshing fail on your CAD model?”
• Ozen Engineering was named ANSYS Channel Partner of the Year for 2015.
• This may be the coolest CFD simulation I’ve seen in a long time: the entire human circulatory system (or at least every blood vessel that’s bigger than 1 mm in diameter). See image below.
• Cornell University is offering an online class A Hands-On Introduction to Engineering Simulations using ANSYS. Course starts 01 June 2016.
• ESI‘s 2015 sales were up slightly over 12%.

Events

• The 25th International Meshing Roundtable will be held in Washington, DC on 27-30 September 2016.
  • The call for papers is open and full manuscripts are due 30 May 2016.
  • The IMR is introducing a new Software Track (in addition to their traditional Research Track) for which applied meshing papers are solicited.
  • The IMR is again holding a meshing contest. [The IMR meshing contest is fun and if you’re doing computational work you should enter.]
• The 12th International Conference on Fluid Dynamics will be held 19-20 December 2016 in Cairo.  [Edited to correct conference name.]

Simulating the entire human circulatory system at the Randles Lab, Duke University. Image from BBC. See link above.

Let There Be Light – And Tetrahedra

When I say “artists who work with light,” the first two names that immediately pop into everyone’s mind are Robert Irwin and Dan Flavin. [That’s who you thought of, right?]

The work of James Nizam is profiled on Colossal under the title “the immateriality of light.” In that article you’ll find examples of how Nizam is able to shape light into geometric forms despite its lack of materiality. See the tet embedded within two pyramids in the image below.

The geometric parallel with meshing is obvious. But the immateriality of light also translates into meshing, not because the mesh itself is a virtual/digital construct, but because it’s the eventual CFD flow solution that’s made material through visualization.

Be certain to visit the artist’s website for more examples of his work.

James Nizam, Nested Polyhedra, 2014. Image from Colossal. Click images for article.

Events

• CD-adapco blogged about how their customers are taking full advantage of their software in simulation and first thing cited is automation. The article was written based on activities at their recent STAR Global Conference and includes a link to some of the presentations.
• Desktop Engineering also published part 2 of their take-aways from the STAR Global Conference.
• CONSELF has scheduled a series of webinars in April and May covering topics from valve and pipe flow to wind tunnels.
• Ford, Cummins, and CIMdata will deliver keynotes at May’s modeFRONTIER International Users Meeting.
• You can attend the CFD Certificate Workshop at Toronto’s North York College of Information and Technology on 16 April 2016.
• The 2016 Beta CAE Nordic Open Meeting is coming up soon on 05 April in Gothenburg.

Award-winning visualization of a FLOW-3D simulation of contaminant dispersion. (Very cool.) Image from Flow Science. Click image for article and video.

People

• Tech Clarity wants to learn how leading companies are empowering design engineers with simulation. Take their 10 minute survey and maybe win an Amazon gift card.
• On a similar note, ENGINEERING.com summarized January’s Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Summit (ASSESS) by citing five strategies for expanding the use of simulation: democratization, confidence, cost reduction, broader integration, and research coordination.
• The CAD Society announced recipients of its annual awards.
  • Blake Courter received the Peter Marks Pioneer Award
  • David Cohn received the Joe Grecco Community Award
  • Peter Schroer received the Leadership Award
  • Lifetime Achievement Award to be announced at next month’s COFES
• The Automotive Research Center in Indianapolis is hiring a CFD Engineer.
• Episode 4 of the Talking CFD podcast with SimScale’s David Heiny is now online.
• The global CFD market is forecasted to grow 13.6% through 2019.
• Exa’s financial performance is strong, with Q4 results up 8% and license revenue up 14%.

Applications & Software

Screen capture from a video showing a simulation of gear lubrication done using TwinMesh and CFX. Image from twinmesh.com. Click image for article and video.

• CFD for automotive aerodynamics in India’s growing car market.
• CD-adapco launched STAR-Cast v11.02 with a new high pressure die casting module.
• Space’s CFD Launch Simulation Challenge may be the most informal CFD challenge I’ve seen yet.
• New to CFD? Check out cfMesh’s CFD for Beginners.
• The Vulkan 1.0 specification was released for “cross-platform access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs.”
• See how you can link simulation cases in EnSight.

What’s New at Pointwise

• Join us for a webinar on 05 April with Tecplot, Standford’s SU2 team, and Stanford’s Solar Car team on how CFD simulation helped them improve their car’s aerodynamic efficiency.
• You can learn about mesh generation using Pointwise at our training course in Fort Worth on 12-14 April.
• If you’re at the SAE World Congress, please come hear us present our work on Meshing Considerations for Automotive Shape Design Optimization.
• Your CFD and meshing work will make a great presentation at the Pointwise User Group Meeting. The call for papers is open with a due date of 01 July.

See what happens when you set off a firecracker indoors. Simulation by Caelus. Click link for video.

Rivers of Facets

As mentioned previously, I enjoy the little moments when two of my interests intersect. In this case, Walt Disney World’s new Rivers of Light show at their Animal Kingdom Park has given their floating lanterns a “rustic minimalism” through the use of lights and a faceted style.

Screen capture from a Disney Imagineering video showing how the floating lanterns from the new Rivers of Light attraction were created. Click image for video on Facebook.

Question of the Week: How Many Decimals do You Use for Pi?

JPL wrote about why their most precise calculations use 3.141592653589793 for pi. How many do you use in your CFD code? Does anyone actually hard-code the number? Or do you just compute it using a fundamental equation and store it in whatever floating point or double precision variable is consistent with the rest of your code?

Dr. Richard Matus, Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing.

I grew up as an air force brat, so moving around the country was a feature of my younger days. I was born in San Antonio and also lived in Abilene, Big Spring, and Waco in Texas, Tampa Florida, Pemberton New Jersey, Montgomery Alabama, and Merced and Novato in California while growing up. My dad was a flight instructor and taught me to fly when I was in high school, so I grew up with an affinity for airplanes and aviation.

I earned B.S. and Master of Engineering degrees in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M University in the early 1980’s, and as an undergraduate worked at the Low-Speed Wind Tunnel helping to design wind tunnel models and conduct tests. Coincidentally, Steve Karman, now a staff specialist at Pointwise, was an aerospace engineering undergraduate at A&M at the same time, and that is where we first met.

After completing the master’s degree, I started my aerospace career as a systems engineer on the OH-58D KIOWA program at Bell Helicopter, working on the mast-mounted sight (the stuff inside that ball above the rotor). However, I really wanted to work on aerodynamics, so I began taking classes at night at the University of Texas at Arlington and eventually went back to graduate school there full time to compete a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering specializing in CFD. While there I developed a space-marching Euler code, which nowadays is a real oddity, but in the 1980’s was an efficient way to solve supersonic flows.

After graduation, I joined the CFD group at General Dynamics Fort Worth division and worked on the X-30 National Aerospace Plane project. If you have read previous This Is How I Mesh articles you’ll know that is also where I met fellow current Pointwise employees John Chawner, John Steinbrenner, Chris Fouts, Erick Gantt, Pat Baker, and Mike Remotigue. The X-30 project was exciting to work on because it was pushing cutting edge technologies like CFD to help design a single-stage-to-orbit reusable vehicle. There were tremendous challenges in predicting supersonic combustion in the scramjet engines and boundary layer transition on the surface of the vehicle, both of which have significant effects on vehicle performance. I was working with a team developing and applying CFD for the project and spent most of my time developing a parabolized Navier-Stokes solver, Penguin. It had to account for transition, non-ideal gas equation of state, combustion, boundary layer transition, and bow shock fitting in the flow solution and it had to generate its own grid as it marched downstream. Quite a challenge, but it was a rewarding project to work on.

In the early 1990’s the U.S. defense budget was declining and the X-30 project budget was as well, so in 1992 I moved on to work at Fluent, Inc. in New Hampshire. Now Fluent is part of ANSYS, but back then they were an independent company, and I started out as product manager for RAMPANT, their first unstructured CFD code, bits of which I think still exist in Fluent to this day. Later I was manager of their aerospace, automotive, and turbomachinery industry team.

In January 1995, just after Pointwise, Inc. was formed, I ran into John Chawner at the AIAA Aerospace Sciences meeting in Reno. He was representing Pointwise, Inc. and demonstrating Gridgen. I remember thinking he and John Steinbrenner were pretty bold to try to build a company around nothing but meshing. We had several discussions over the next few months because they were looking for someone with sales and marketing experience, and I was interested in becoming a partner in a startup business. I joined them in October 1995 to handle sales, marketing and support, and that is pretty much what I have been doing for the last 20 years.

• Location: Fort Worth, TX
• Current position: Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing
• Current computer: Lenovo W520, Intel Core i7-270QM, 2.40GHz, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro 2000M, Windows 7.
• One word that best describes how you work: (Think pack mule, not thoroughbred.)

What software or tools do you use every day?

When I am in the office, Microsoft Outlook for email and scheduling, Sage CRM for keeping track of customer data, Quickbooks for financial and sales information, Microsoft Word for writing and editing, and Pidgin for instant messaging. When I am traveling, it is iPhone Mail and Calendars for email and scheduling, Messages for texting, Google Maps for finding my way around, and Yelp for figuring out where to eat.

What does your workspace look like?

Rick’s current workspace.

Probably the most unusual aspect of my workspace is that I have a laptop and don’t use a mouse, even when running Pointwise. In the old days, I generated a lot of grids while riding on airplanes and there isn’t room for a mouse next to a laptop on the tray table, so I trained myself to use the trackpad for 3D display manipulations. It takes a lot of fingers sometimes, but it’s not too hard once you get used to it.

What are you currently working on?

Like most everyone at Pointwise, I’m somewhat involved in our upcoming Pointwise release. It is a major step forward that will allow people to quickly generate high-quality mixed element grids with tetrahedra, prisms, pyramids, and hexahedra all in the same block. We are in the documentation update and quality assurance phase of the release process, so there is still a lot of work to be done. Also, we are switching to a new license manager for this release, which will be easier to install and more stable, but we are working through all our licensing processes to make sure the changeover is as seamless as possible.

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

I don’t really have a meshing specialty except for having been around for a long time, so I can remember why things were implemented a certain way and remember obscure techniques for making grids that the newer folks have not been exposed to yet.

Any tips for our users?

Yes, please call or email us whenever you have a question. Our support staff likes to help people solve problems, and they are good at it. Your license or maintenance fee includes free technical support, so please take advantage of it. We hate to hear that someone has been having trouble with something for days, when we can help them out right away.

What project are you most proud of and why?

I don’t know if you call it a project, but I get a lot of satisfaction from having contributed to the success of Pointwise, Inc. over the years. We are not a huge company, but I think we develop high-quality products, support them with a professional, yet personal, approach, and treat customers and employees with a great deal of respect.

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

I have dabbled with OpenFOAM, Caelus, and SU2 the last few years, but if I really need to check out a grid in a flow solver I still fall back on ANSYS Fluent which is the last CFD code I spent any significant time with.

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

OK, this is highly self-serving, but I think SAE Paper 2016-01-1389, Meshing Considerations for Automotive Shape Design Optimization by Travis Carrigan and Claudio Pita from Pointwise and Mark Landon from Optimal Solutions is very good. It will be presented at the SAE 2016 World Congress in April in Detroit, and it shows very nicely how our T-Rex meshing technique quickly builds high-quality meshes on realistic geometries. In this case, the high-quality is crucial to making a reliable mesh morphing process for shape optimization.

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

I think this may be the first time in over 25 years when I will not attend a technical society conference or workshop. Of course, I will be at the 2016 Pointwise User Group Meeting in Fort Worth this September and there will be some good technical content there. (Hint: We are accepting abstracts until July 1^st.) I’ll also attend the VINAS User Conference in Tokyo in October. VINAS is our distributor in Japan, and we are celebrating 20 years of doing business together this year.

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

I spend a lot of time running, which I don’t really like too much, but I have to do it because I like to cook and eat so much. I also like to fly. I belong to a local flying club and enjoy flying on weekend trips or just to buzz around in circles in the sky. Most summers, I’ll fly up to Oshkosh, Wisconsin and camp next to the airplane for a week with other guys from the flying club for the big EAA Airventure airshow.

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

Sanity check your results with some basic calculations. Does the mass flow going out match the mass flow coming in? Is the total pressure above freestream anywhere? It’s easy to assume everything is right when you get a solution, but it is too easy to make an input error and not notice.

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

Del Frisco’s is my favorite for a special meal. Can’t beat the steaks there. My favorite casual place is La Playa Maya. As you can guess from the name, they serve quite a few Mexican seafood dishes. The Vuelve a la Vida seafood cocktail makes a good meal all by itself.

Next week Claudio Pita and I will be in the Motor City attending the SAE 2016 World Congress and Exhibition. There we will be presenting the work we performed in cooperation with Mark Landon of Optimal Solutions where we have defined a set of meshing techniques that enable robust shape deformation for design optimization.

For this study we used the DrivAer, a realistic automotive model developed by the Institute of Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics at the Technische Universität München. This geometry allowed us to thoroughly explore solid modeling and surface meshing techniques and use T-Rex, Pointwise’s hybrid viscous meshing technology, to generate a high quality volume mesh that served as the baseline design. An additional 28 designs were derived from the baseline mesh using Arbitrary Shape Deformation within Sculptor, a technique developed by Optimal Solutions for performing smooth volumetric shape deformations on the mesh level while maintaining cell quality and boundary layer thickness and orientation. The aerodynamic performance of each design was computed using OpenFOAM and a design was found that resulted in a 4.4% decrease in drag over the baseline model.

The volume mesh for the DrivAer generated using Pointwise’s T-Rex meshing algorithm highlighting prisms in the boundary layer region and tetrahedra in the farfield.

The control points of the Arbitrary Shape Deformation volume highlighted in green illustrate the parameterization of the DrivAer grid model.

The paper is titled “Meshing Considerations for Automotive Shape Design Optimization” and will be presented on Wednesday, April 13^th at 1:30PM in the Design Optimization – Methods and Applications (Part 2 of 2) session in Room 312B. The session begins at 1:00PM.

Claudio and I will be wandering the exhibition floor and attending sessions that Tuesday and Wednesday. If you would like to learn more about our work and meet with us while we are in town, drop us a line on Twitter (@Pointwise) and #LetsTalkMeshing.