News
- FluiDyna has added nanoFluidX (particle-based simulation) and ultraFluidX (Lattice-Boltzmann) to Altair’s Partner Alliance.
- Onshape, “the first and only full-cloud 3D CAD system,” has gained another $80 million investment, bringing their total to $144 million.
- Monica Schnitger comments on this news (the funding was unsolicited) and concludes that CAD is not dead. [They’ve been saying that about painting since 1839.]
- Someone thinks the ban in wind tunnel testing in Formula-1 is a conspiracy to give advantage to teams with better CFD.
- CFD pioneer, Dr. Richard Pletcher of Iowa State, passed away earlier this month. Dr. Pletcher co-authored the classic CFD textbook, Computational Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer, with Drs. Dale Anderson and John Tannehill.
- [This book was my introduction to CFD. The airfoil mesh on the dust jacket of early editions was generated by Pointwise’s Dr. John Steinbrenner while he was a grad student at Iowa State.]
CFD simulation of a heart valve from the Inst. for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin. Image from medGadget. Click image for article.
Software
- KARALIT CFD v.3.0 is now available.
- GrabCAD shares some thoughts on the STL file format for 3D printing.
- Beta CAE released ANSA and μETA v15.3.2.
- FLOW-3D v11.1 features a new combustible objects model.
- Converge CFD Version 2.3 will be released soon with new chemistry and reaction models. See image below.
An in-cylinder CFD solution from Converge CFD done by PSA Peugeot Citroen. Image from TheEngineer.co.uk. See link above.
Applications
- CFD was used to compute a 12.5% fuel savings from the addition of a hull vane to an offshore patrol vessel.
- VICUSdt, a marine consultancy, uses CFD for a variety of analysis including hull and propeller design. See image below.
CFD solution for a ship’s propeller by VICUSdt. Image from Ship-Technology.com. See link above.
Pointwise News
- Pointwise Version 17.3 R4 is ready for download and production use. The PyFR CFD solve and the ESP conceptual design CAD tool are supported.
- You have until 30 October to enter our contest for the best desktop wallpaper created in Pointwise. All valid entrants get a t-shirt and the winner gets a goodie box.
- Pointwise was recently awarded a research contract from the U.S. Air Force to continue work on our software’s integration with overset grid assembly and other meshing techinques.
- If you missed our webinar on automotive design optimization, it’s now archived on our website for viewing at your leisure.
Painting Isn’t Dead and Neither is the Grid
Stanley Whitney’s current exhibition in NYC gets a nice write-up in The New Yorker and I’ll just repeat some of their insights here.
“The glamour of the work alerts you to an onset of beauty, pending the appropriate feeling and an endorsement in thought. But the juxtapositions and the compositional rhythms of the colors, jarring ever so slightly, won’t resolve into unity.”
I often think about the grid motif in abstract painting and see how it is a perfect vehicle for creating tension in which the regularity of the arrangement is vibrated by color and depth and brushwork.
You can read an interview with the artist in BOMB Magazine.
Stanley Whitney, Loveroot, 2008. Image from The New Yorker. See link above.
