*** Late Edition ***

Must Read

Despite being a post from nearly two years ago, Lessons from the History of CFD is well worth reading today. Its origin was the 2013 symposium Celebrating the Careers of Antony Jameson, Phil Roe and Bram van Leer. You’ll learn

• who first coined the term CFD,
• when and where artificial viscosity was invented,
• what article in 1965 crystallized the computational sciences,
• and more.

Bonus good reading: Lorena Barba’s article on Computational Thinking: I do not think it means what you think it means.

Meshing and CAD

FEA of rubber mounts using local remeshing in MSC’s software. Image from MSC. Click image for article.

• Mesh tolerancing advice (for 3D printing) from GrabCAD.
• Work with your meshes in your browser and online using MeshLabJS.
• Converting STL to STEP.
• Get free CAD models of any place on Earth from CAD Mapper.
• Read about generative design in which we learn CAD doesn’t really stand for computer-aided design but rather computer-aided documentation.
• TwinMesh delves into the impact of mesh resolution.

Reducing automotive emissions using CFD is the topic of an article about FloEFD from ENGINEERING.com. Image from ENGINEERING.com. Click image for article.

Software & Hardware

• Mentor Graphics is surveying FloEFD users. Why not take 2-3 minutes to help them out.
• PyFR 1.3.0 is now available with an interface to GiMMiK. [This news is a little late. Sorry.]
• OpenMDAO 1.6.0 (the framework for multidisciplinary design optimization) was released.
• [Inside HPC has been publishing a lot of good stuff lately like this article on] How the success of exascale computing depends on co-design, a system-wide approach to heterogeneity, intelligent networks, and compatibility.
• Beta CAE released ANSA v16.03.
• And Altair released Hyperworks v14.0.
• Advanced Clustering has made Star-CCM+ available in the cloud.
• And Desktop Engineering wrote Part 1 of their multi-part coverage of the STAR Global Conference where the big questions involved their acquisition by Siemens.

Events & Jobs

• The Thermal and Fluids Analysis Workshop (TFAWS) 2016 will be held 01-05 August at NASA Ames Research Center.
• Lots of aerodynamics in a Formula 1 car.
• Altair has openings for a Senior Development Engineer for compressible flows (Job ID #27245) and a Senior Development Engineer for multiphase flows (Job ID #27244). Learn more at their job site and enter the Job ID number.
• There’s a new CFD podcast coming “for entrepreneurial engineers wanting to take their CFD businesses to the next level” : Talking CFD from the folks at CFD Engine. [You never know who’ll they’ll interview.]
• The 11th OpenFOAM Workshop will be held 26-30 June 2016 in Guimaraes, Portugal.

Only 288 Days Until Christmas

Before you know it, it will be time to start decorating the tree for Christmas and what better way to top it off (at least for a mesher) than with a Ten Tetrahedra Tree Topper. GrabCAD user Blake Courter has created a 3D-printable ornament into which 50 LED lights can be inserted. Be sure to see the video here.

Blake Courter’s Ten Tetrahedra Tree Topper. Image from GrabCAD. See links above.

Bonus: If the simplest Platonic solid is the 4-sided tetrahedra, how do you make dice that when rolled will display 1 of 3 faces? The three-sided die (aka Trice) fascinated a student at the NJ Institute of Technology. Reading about the solution should fascinate you.

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.

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.

Dr. John Steinbrenner, Executive Vice President, Research and Development.

I was born and raised in Parma, OH, a blue-collar suburb of Cleveland coincidentally less than 10 miles from John Chawner’s hometown of Rocky River.  I was the first in my family to attend college, but was followed by my younger sister who recently retired as a school counselor in Elyria, OH.  My older sister, probably the smartest of the 3 of us, still lives less than 20 minutes from our original home.

Starting in 4th grade I viewed working hard as an avenue to distinguish myself from other academically-oriented kids.  From 8^th grade on I had an affinity for math, and to a lesser degree, science. My hard work broke down when it came to selecting a career, however – I chose engineering almost solely because someone told me that it required a lot of math.  I may as well have read about engineering on the side of a bus.  Fortunately, I chose the University of Cincinnati’s College of Engineering for better reasons.  It was a state school, which made it affordable; it was 250 miles from home, which seemed just about right, and it had a mandatory co-op program, which added a year but guaranteed a paying job and a more compelling resume.  I would recommend the co-op experience to anyone. During my freshman year I enrolled in the Aerospace Engineering department, because I had applied too late for my first choice of chemical engineering, probably because I didn’t see the deadline on that bus that drove by.

My first co-op job was in downtown Cincinnati working for less than minimum wage in a very small civil engineering firm.  At that job I learned how to draft (fun) and how to hold a surveying pole vertically for long periods at a time (not fun). My more substantial co-op position was working (a total of 15 months) at the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Lab (BRL, now ARL) at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland.  This was my first exposure to CFD and rudimentary computer graphics.  Scientists in this group used axisymmetric structured grids to compute Navier-Stokes solutions on army ordnance, in hopes of computing things such as boat tail drag and magnus forces. Computations were performed on a CDC Cyber 7600 at a rate up to 100,000 times faster than the famous ENIAC machine housed at BRL 25 years earlier.

After graduation I attended the Iowa State University, a school recommended to me for its renowned CFD reputation and graduates, and which along with UC was designated one of 7 NASA Centers in CFD.  I studied under Professor Dale Anderson and completed a Master’s degree two years later in mesh adaption using equidistribution.  I had developed an interest in meshing (all meshes were structured then) when a colleague/friend asked me to mesh the face of an acoustic guitar.  I could not figure out how to do it until I was introduced to the transfinite interpolation method a few years later.

After my informal christening into the aerospace field by having 2 offers of employment rescinded only days before I was ready to accept, I accepted an offer in Fort Worth, Texas in 1984, a city and state that grew on me very quickly and which would now be very difficult to leave.  General Dynamics Fort Worth had started a CFD group the previous year, and for the handful of us in the group it was an exciting time.  While work was underway to develop Euler and N-S codes prior to my arrival, there was a dire need for mesh generation, which I saw as my opportunity.  I started working on Gridgen2D, an internal R&D project that was used to generate structured surface meshes, and which assisted Steve Karman in publishing the world’s first structured block Euler analysis of a complete aircraft (1986).  In 1987 we (Chawner, Fouts, Remotigue and I) bid on and were awarded a contract from the USAF to develop interactive grid generation codes.  One of these codes, Gridblock, has served as the GUI for all subsequent versions of Gridgen.  In 1989, during the contraction of GDFW’s workforce due to cancellation of the A-12 program, John Chawner and I went to work at MDA Engineering, Dale Anderson’s research company, to continue Gridgen development under funding by NASA Langley and NASA Ames.

The proverbial crossroads were reached in 1994 when future government grid generation funding had dried up.  Though Chawner had a young son (now 2 sons) and I had year-old twin sons, we both felt that trying to commercialize Gridgen was less risky than venturing into a new locale and job.  Pointwise was incorporated that same year, and Rick Matus came on as partner #3 a few months later.  I stayed at MDA for an additional year to complete an existing contract and also my PhD at UT-Arlington.  Unlike Chawner and Matus, who were working long hours bootstrapping Pointwise, my long hours at MDA came with a paycheck.  All told, it took us several more years before we were able to draw salaries that were on par with our pre-Pointwise positions.

Though Pointwise is now in its 22nd year, I often feel that I am working the same job that I had at GDFW and MDA thirty years ago.  I still get to work on exciting mesh methods and algorithms, I still interact with users (now mostly through our support team instead of direct customers) in order to arrive at complicated meshing solutions, and I still interact with many of the people I’ve known nearly my entire career.  On most days that last remark is a good thing.

• Location: Fort Worth, TX
• Current position: Executive Vice-President, Research and Development
• Current computer: Dell Precision T3600, (Windows 7), and a Dell Precision T5400 (Linux)
• One word that best describes how you work: Uneven

What software or tools do you use every day?

Gvim, PerForce, Outlook, Chrome, VisualStudio, and WinMerge (often).  In the early days when we supported Silicon Graphics Workstations, I also enjoyed using CaseVision, an IDE with a couple of excellent, easy to use profilers.

What does your workspace look like?

John’s current workspace.

My immediate workspace is comfortably bland.  The rest of my office looks like something designed by PeeWee Herman’s uptight accountant cousin.

What are you currently working on?

I have recently completed a refactoring of the T-Rex code in anticipation of some work we will be undertaking via an Air Force contract pertaining to overset grids.  Specifically, T-Rex was originally written in C in Gridgen, but has since been converted to C++ in our research branch of Pointwise.

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

Since I’ve doing this for so long, my meshing specialties have changed over the years.  I spent a number of years at GD-FW and MDA developing and tweaking Gridgen’s multi-block elliptic methods.   I still occasionally dive into Pointwise’s elliptic techniques, which are based on Gridgen’s.  I have also spent considerable time working on hyperbolic surface and volume meshing, fault tolerant meshing, and I was the custodian of our unstructured surface and volume meshing tools until fairly recently.   I have also incorporated 2 early incarnations of our native CAD readers, though I do not consider myself an expert.  Finally, I have been the developer of the T-Rex anisotropic extruder for the past several years.  A surprising (to me) portion of this time has been concentrated on cell combination into other canonical shapes (pyramids, prisms, hexes).  T-Rex has been the typical project that took a month to develop in prototype form, and then several more years to perfect (still in progress).

Any tips for our users?

This probably should go without saying, but attend a Pointwise training class!  The training will expose you to a number of features and methods that you may otherwise have no reason to run across.  If you can’t get to Fort Worth (and why not?), take advantage of the growing number of on-line tools that Pointwise offers, including documentation, webinars, and DIY training.

What project are you most proud of and why?

I am very proud of the stature in the CFD community that Pointwise has reached as a result of this 30+ year journey.   John Chawner and Rick Matus have done stellar jobs in building and maintaining our reputation, integrity and overall presence.  When we first got started Rick said that he hoped to grow to approximately our present size within 20 years.  Since I was focused on the technical side, that didn’t seem feasible at the time.   I am also thrilled that we have been able to hire and (largely) retain employees of such high caliber.  We have a cohesive group of folks with differing expertise that blend together to make Pointwise.   When you look at the 5 year anniversary photo in the Pointwise kitchen, you will recognize all 6 as current employees.  We haven’t aged a day in 16 years.

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

I rarely need to run a CFD solver, though on occasion I will run Fluent or OpenFOAM to insure mesh suitability.  I previously used OpenFOAM’s checkMesh utility to validate face-to-face connections on combined meshes coming from T-Rex, and ParaView to inspect combined mesh quality.  Fortunately, very soon I will no longer need to use checkMesh or Paraview, since the specific tools I used are available in Pointwise v18.

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

There are several technical papers sitting on my desk that I have skimmed over several times that I plan to read in detail in the near future, all having to do with adjoint CFD methods.  Most of the time I set them down when my head starts to spin too fast.  Another technical book I am reading at home is Pinball Machine Maintenance, by Henk De Jager, which still spins my head, albeit at a lower rate and with bells and lights.

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

Nothing is planned yet, but I will probably attend the Overset Mesh Conference in Seattle in the fall.  We’ve got some cool stuff in work, and I would like to be there to gauge interest.

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

For years my hobbies have been coaching baseball, remodeling our houses, and playing softball.   I stopped coaching baseball 9 years ago when my sons turned 13 and outgrew my coaching skills. I’ve also slowed down on the home remodeling, mainly because the remaining things to do are either outside my comfort zone, or are high dollar items that will be reconsidered when both sons are done with college.  That leaves softball.  I’m the worst player (and 2^nd oldest) on an average team that plays in one of the worst leagues in FW.  A true win for us means no injuries, though we tend to win slightly more often than we lose.

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

I was once told never to fall asleep on a competitor.   The comment was made referring to another mesh generation package, but it has equal applicability to any business.  If you’re working on something you deem important, how do you know that your competition isn’t investing twice the effort?

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

I realize I’m duplicating other Pointwise people’s choices, but (my wife) Kathy’s and my go-to weekend restaurant is Sushi Axiom.  For special occasions, Del Frisco’s in downtown Fort Worth is hard to beat. Finally, when I’m in Cincinnati, Cleveland or Indianapolis, Skyline Chili is the place.  Mr. Hero in NE Ohio is also good, though not quite as sublime as you may have been told (or will be soon).

Special “I Wish I Had More Time” Edition

OpenFOAM was used as part of the simulation of flow through air filter bags. Image from engineerlive.com. Click image for article.

• Pointwise asks you to complete a brief survey on your use of CAD geometry for meshing. A small thank-you gift is involved.
• Onshape’s Jon Hirschtick shares thoughts on the history of CAD as it changed from serving the elite to serving us all.
• Speaking of Onshape, they launched an education plan.
• NVIDIA calls their recently announced $129,000, 170 teraflop DGX-1 a “supercomputer in a box” [as opposed, I assume, to “in a room.”].
• Here’s a link to NASA Langley’s Turbulence Modeling Resource.
• The 5th Workshop on Grid Generation for Numerical Computations (Tetrahedron V) will be held 4-5 July 2016 at the University of Liege [sorry for the lack of diacriticals] in Belgium.
• ANSYS now offers a pay-per-use license.
• Here’s a blog post about a couple of the industry analyst presentations at COFES.
• All three sessions of the Friendship Systems and Simscale webinar on F-1 aerodynamics are now online.
• GrabCAD has a nice write-up on 3D printed parts and meshing.
• Last week at COFES I saw a demo of Sandia’s work on topology optimization and it’s as close to magic as I’ve seen on a computer.
• Speaking of COFES, Kubotek launched their new 3D geometry kernel, KCM.
• NASA’s University Leadership Initiative seeks academics to partner on aeronautics research.
• Speaking of NASA, Langley Research Center seeks to hire a Research Computer Scientist for CFD.
• Flow Science blogged about simulating Pelton turbines.
• Documentation for the Wind-US CFD code was updated.

Red Bull Racing describes their use of ANSYS’ CFD Technology. Image from themanufacturer.com. Click image for article.

Modern Art for Your Inner Child

MondriPong is a playable Pong game set within the landscape of a Piet Mondrian painting. Enjoy.

MondriPong (see link above). Image from Colossal.

Meshing has been very, very good to me.  Who’s me? And what do I do? I’m an engineer by education, a programmer by practice, and now I mostly enjoy meeting and learning from interesting people.

John Chawner, President of Pointwise, Inc.

I suppose I should begin with the obligatory “my first computer” story. It was my senior year of high school, and the first computer I used was a Wang 3300 where we programmed in BASIC and storage was on punched paper tape. (I still have one of those tapes somewhere in my home office.)  My graduating class was also the last where slide rules were taught and required for use in physics class. (That very same slide rule is in my desk at work right now.) Moral of these stories: I never throw anything away.

I earned my B.S. in mechanical/aerospace engineering from and met my lovely wife of 30 years at Syracuse University. The only formal programming education I’ve had in my life was my freshman year when I was taught the language APL. If you’ve never seen APL (now called J), it looks like what you’d get if you printed a Perl script using the Dingbats font. On a related note, my lovely wife is still trying to program me because she’s a pearl and I’m just a dingbat. I’m also hoping she never throws anything away either.

Jump to the summer of 1983. In what might have been the best engineering summer job ever, I worked at NASA Lewis in the 10×10 supersonic tunnel, taught myself Fortran, and ran a Method of Characteristics code on a supersonic inlet. I still have in my desk (see above, throw nothing away) a green plastic symbol template for plotting data that my summer boss was not supposed to give me because interns needed to do real work, not plot data with pencil, paper, and templates. My boss also gave me a moon rock only to explain later he picked it up off the ground below the tunnel’s cooling towers. Moral of this story: I am gullible.

I moved to Texas right after graduation and started working at General Dynamics Fort Worth Division – the best job ever for a kid right with a fresh engineering degree. I started in propulsion analysis where I was tasked with learning how to use this new technology called CFD on inlets and nozzles. (GD had started a CFD group the previous year). We started out using CFD codes from NASA (PEPSI/S and MINT) and the USAF (PARC). I spent a year on a CFD simulation of a single 2D nozzle. One year. One 2D nozzle. I doubt my bosses thought I was doing the best job ever.

Graduate school at the University of Texas at Arlington was a turning point for me because I took a class on grid generation from Prof. Rich Hindman. My notes for the entire class were written in green ink. Rich made meshing come alive for me and set me on the path toward the rest of my professional career. Back at work, I got involved with John Steinbrenner and Chris Fouts working on Gridgen from 1987 to 1991. It was the most fun three people ever had working on grid generation (trust me, that is not hyperbole). I taught myself IRIX by reading SGI’s entire set of user manuals while Gridgen3D was compiling and running. (I’ll leave the contents of my SGI collection to your imagination – recall that I never throw anything away.)  In an odd turn of the tables, John Steinbrenner, a friend, and I later wrote the text, homework, and exams and taught the grid generation graduate level course at UTA. Yes, I still have all the course materials. No, I do not know what ink color our students used.

Figuring that we couldn’t do too much (more) damage to our careers, John Steinbrenner and I decided to create Pointwise, Inc. in 1994. Our idea was immediately validated by one mentor who said “I gotta tell you, I think you’re crazy.” (Note: Owning a small business is like agreeing to be punched in the face for a living.) Sanity aside, we got some validation when Rick Matus joined us a year later. Please note how I managed to surround myself with smart Ph.D. types, making me the Howard Wolowitz of our trio (minus the turtleneck).

And before you know it, Travis is in my office asking me to write this article and tell you about the most recent computer I’m using.

• Location: Fort Worth, Texas
• Current position: seated
• Current computer: a 5-year-old Dell laptop running Windows 7 (Repeat: I never throw anything away.)
• One word that best describes how you work: obliviously

What software or tools do you use every day?

Each morning I boot-up my old laptop and start these apps in this order:

• Microsoft Outlook: I use every part of Outlook from the obvious Email, Calendar, and Contacts to the less obvious but powerful Tasks (for managing my projects using my homebrew version of David Allen’s Getting Things Done), Journal (for tracking my time), and Notes (for making notes, duh).
• Google Chrome: Is which browser to use even a question anymore?
• Pidgin: I use this to message my co-workers. Another team here is looking at Slack which is what the cool kids use now. Hence, I will not be able to use it for another decade or so.
• iTunes: I don’t own a Mac, I don’t buy music from the iTunes store, I don’t stream music, I don’t want to use iCloud (so please stop asking me, Apple). But I’ve ripped all my CDs to electronic format and pretty much have music playing all day, every day.

After that, I use whatever the day requires of me: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, our internal wiki.

I edit Glyph scripts using Vim. Is which text editor to use even a question anymore?

And Pointwise. Is which mesher to use… Never mind.

What does your workspace look like?

John’s current workspace.

My style of interior design is “engineer chic.” Engineer because I have cables and cardboard and books everywhere, chic because I have pillows on my couch, a fishbowl, and plants. I also have prints of abstract paintings on the wall for people to point at and say “I could do that.” I really, really, really wish you would.

What are you currently working on?

Besides looking for grammar and spelling errors on the internet?

I’m working with two genuine smart people – Dr. John Dannenhoffer and Dr. Nigel Taylor – on a paper for AIAA Aviation this summer in Washington, DC on mesh generation’s role in the CFD Vision 2030 Study.

Product planning never ends with input coming from smart people on all sides: customers, partners, our Advisory Team, and every team inside the company. Whether it’s a small tweak to an existing feature, a new meshing technique, or new ways to put meshing to work, we always have several irons in the fire. Keep in mind what Dwight Eisenhower said: “A plan is worthless but planning is indispensable.”

Through my involvement with the AIAA Meshing, Visualization, and Computational Environments technical committee, I’m thrilled to be involved in planning for the 1st AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop, to be held the summer of 2017 in conjunction with the 3rd AIAA High Lift Prediction Workshop. Other AIAA CFD workshops have set a high bar so our work is cut out for us but we hope to create the first in a series of events that will illuminate something we want to make invisible.

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

There are three parts of the meshing process I’m very interested in: use of geometry data, mesh quality and its effects on solution convergence and accuracy, and the overall user experience. I also write Glyph scripts that are virtually worthless except for making Pointwise do something that it really shouldn’t do, like the one that plays Conway’s Game of Life on a structured grid.

I am really good at breaking (aka testing) software. So folks here have a love-hate relationship with me when I get a hankerin’ to mesh something. And I usually don’t break the meshing stuff, it’s usually something quite bizarre that results in my favorite reply, one I used back in the day: “That should never happen.” Or my other favorite, “That’s been in there for about 10 years.” Or “Wouldn’t you rather be doing something on the internet?”

Any tips for our users?

1. Ask questions.
2. Stay connected.
3. Never stop learning.

What project are you most proud of and why?

One project on this list has to be GRIDGEN Version 6, the first one John Steinbrenner, Chris Fouts, and I wrote for the U.S. Air Force between 1987 and 1991. It feels good to know that our software formed the basis for decades of work, not just our own work but the work of other engineers who simulated and designed some very cool things.

Overall, it’s much less about the projects and more about the people with whom I’ve worked with over the years. I’ve made many true friendships, many valuable professional relationships, and have had opportunities to meet some truly great folks. I’ve also managed to piss off some people, not because I try to be a jerk but because it comes naturally to me.

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

Meshing is an end unto itself. Isn’t it?

The last time I used CFD was on the X-30 National Aerospace Plane (NASP). I had started my professional career in the simulation of the inlet and nozzle components of propulsion systems so on the X-30 I was simulating what went into came out of the engines. All structured hex grids. I think we were using the NPARC flow solver. The stories I could tell you about doing 3rd shift, classified computing on the Cray.

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

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, NASA’s CFD Vision 2030 Study should be read by everyone who works in the CFD business.

I’m also reading Delaunay Mesh Generation by Cheng, Dey, and Shewchuk and Finite Element Mesh Generation by Lo for another project I’m working on with yet another genuine smart person.

Online reading, whether it’s blogs or Twitter or podcasts or video or whatever, is a big part of my word diet and I’m glad to see that other engineers are starting to take fuller advantage of these media also. It’s not all about LOLCats and photos of lunch, people.

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

In January I was at AIAA SciTech in San Diego followed shortly thereafter by the 1st Congress on Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Strategies (ASSESS’ motto – “Never forget the last S”) where I got a bonus 3-day stay in Washington, DC courtesy of a blizzard.

By the time this article is published I will have attended the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES), a very cool annual event where you’re free to think big thoughts and network with some very smart people. Later this year I’ll be at AIAA Aviation in DC and the International Meshing Roundtable again in DC.

The conference you should plan to attend is the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016 in Fort Worth in September.

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

My lovely wife and I enjoy visiting Walt Disney World and Disneyland and do so more frequently than is probably healthy. She has also been a distance runner for a couple of years and has succeeded in getting me into running. So we combine running and Disney by participating in runDisney events. We just finished a 5K and 10K at Walt Disney World and my first half marathon is coming up at Disneyland shortly after this article is published. (Note to editor: You may need to reformat this article as an obituary.)

I’m a bowler with delusions of adequacy. Just ask Pat Baker who’s on my league team. He probably likes my bowling less than my golfing.

Because an active lifestyle is overrated, I prefer to spend my off time reading a good book (The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner), listening to good music (check out iapetus or the Rare Noise label), or viewing good art (I’ll probably sneak out of AIAA Aviation to go to the Phillips Collection if anyone wants to tag along).

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

If you’ve read this far you’ve noticed a theme. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. If you don’t know who the dumbest person in the room is, it’s probably you. And since that happens to me a lot, I’ve developed a survival skill: ask good questions.

1. Believe none of what you read and only half of what you see.
2. The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has occurred.
3. Think like a person of action, act like a person of thinking.

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

Why am I always having to pick where we go to dinner?

Where we’d go to eat depends on where we are.

If we were at the office and wanted something casual, we could go to Benito’s for Tex-Mex (their pico de gallo is killer) or Ellerbe Fine Foods (I’ve heard their new grilled Italian pork burger is superb).

If I wanted to show off, we’d go to downtown Fort Worth and either have the best steak in town at Del Frisco’s or fantastic French at St. Emilion (escargot, tres bon).

On the other hand, if we were at my house up by DFW airport we’d go to El Taco H for a burrito the size of a small loaf of bread or Next Wood Fired Bistro where everything’s good.

If we were visiting my home state of Ohio, we’d dine at Skyline Chili in Cincinnati (3-way and two cheese coneys) or Mr. Hero in Cleveland (the Romanburger).

If we were at my alma mater in Syracuse, we’d go to Eva’s European Sweets and Polish Restaurant for dinner the way my Grandma used to make it.

If we were at Walt Disney World we’d go to California Grill atop the Contemporary Resort.

But we should really go to Cafe Modern in The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and then stroll the galleries afterward. The Frank Stella retrospective is opening soon and attending his lecture at The Modern a couple of weeks ago has me all excited to see the exhibition. Y’all should come visit.

Applications

• Boeing’s CFD software helped Callaway Golf produce a tournament winning driver.
• CFD software for designing sailboats.
• Do you think like a simulation engineer? Read about six rules for focusing your thinking.
• Here’s a very cool article about shrink-wrapping and meshing an aorta with geometry from an STL file using ANSYS. Don’t skip the video. (See image below).
• Univa’s Grid Engine provides the HPC resource that powers CFD for Formula-1.
• Read about varying the shape of a fuel injector in CAESES.

Defeatured geometry (left) and tet mesh (right) created in ANSYS. Image from Leap CFD blog. See link above.

Computing

• Remember last summer’s announcement of the National Strategic Computing Initiative, the presidential directive aimed at exascale computing? A discussion about NSCI – or more accurately the lack of apparent progress on it – at the recent HPC User Forum began with a “It’s all BS.” and included commentary on the issue of what NCSI success would look like. See also the discussion of the “ISV problem.”
• On a related note, the report The Vital Importance of High-Performance Computing to U.S. Competitiveness advocates for NSCI.

News from Pointwise

• The Call for Papers (due 01 July) and Attendee Registration (no cost!) are open for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016, 21-22 September in Fort Worth.
• We will be exhibiting and presentation two papers at AIAA Aviation in Washington, DC in June.
  • “Geometry, Mesh Generation, and the CFD 2030 Vision” by John Chawner et al
  • “High Order Mesh Curving Using WCN Mesh Optimization” by Steve Karman et al
• Pointwise is sponsoring the 1st CFD Congress of Brazil.
• The next issue of our bi-monthly email newsletter, The Connector, will be published next month so now is the time to subscribe.

Software

An example of postprocessing a simulation using ParaView inside SALOME. Image from Kitware. Click image for article.

• Tecplot 360 EX 2016 Release 2 includes updated data loaders and support for the 3D SpaceMouse.
• Convergent Science is making good use of Polygonica’s geometry libraries.
• Beta CAE released v16.1.2 (a maintenance release) of their software suite.
• Part 4 of a series on meshing in SolidWorks Flow Simulation.
• Applied CCM released Caelus v6.04. This fork of OpenFOAM includes many new interpolation schemes and a publicly available source code repository for collaboration.
• I don’t recall ever seeing a video trailer for CFD software before, but here’s one for the upcoming release of SolidWorks Flow Simulation.
• The Linux version of meshCurve (for elevating the polynomial degree of meshes) is now available.
• CAESES 4.1 was released.
• Kubotek launced KCM, their geometry kernel.

Quizzes, Contests, Surveys, and Awards

Close-up of Nick Ervinck’s 3D printed sculpture, Wolfram. Image from DEVELOP3D. See link below.

• It’s amazing what you can 3D print these days as exemplified by Nick Ervinck’s sculpture Wolfram, produced on the new Stratasys J750 with support for 360,000 colors as reported by DEVELOP3D.
• Speaking of 3D printing, Stratasys and Desktop Engineering are offering a prize of $1,000 for one participant in their 3D printing quiz.
• Speaking of quizes and surveys, Lifecycle Insights is conducting their 2016 Simulation and Analysis Study focusing on practices and technologies used for simulation. [I strongly recommend all users of simulation share their thoughts and participate in this survey.]
• KOMPAS-3D users will want to participate in Ascon’s 3D Modeling Contest.
• Kitware was recognized as a Top Workplace.

Grab Bag

I just really like this image from an Actran acoustic simulation. Image from MSC. Click image for article.

• MSC has been writing a lot lately about acoustic simulations (see image above) and this article caught my eye: Tuning Acoustic Qualities of Audio Devices with Simulation. Years ago when shopping for stereo speakers [consult your parents for an explanation], I learned that a significant amount of audible distortion comes from vibration of the casing. [Ended up buying a pair of Celestion SL-6s.]
• “Licensing models must change” was a refrain from the original ASSESS Summit. But how? And why? WorldCAD Access summarizes the positions of CAD vendors and subscription based licensing. [Subscriptions here mean annual licenses as opposed to perpetuals. What about monthly subscriptions?]
  • Autodesk: Everyone wants subscriptions.
  • PTC: 70% of users want subscriptions.
  • Dassault: No one wants subscriptions.
• On a related note, read about ANSYS’ pay-per-use licensing.
• FluiDyna, an Altair partner, obtained elite status with NVIDIA for their GPU-accelerated CFD.
• The Siemens Simulation Symposium 2016 will be held 13-14 September in Troy, Michigan.
• The 20th International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation World Congress (IMACS 2016) will be held in Xiamen, China on 10-14 December 2016.
  • The ISGG Symposium on Numerical Grid Generation will be held at IMACS 2016.
• Here’s a nice summary from COFES of CAD translation and formats.
• Have you been listening? Nine episodes of the Talking CFD podcast are now online.

Whale of a Winner

I think you’ll agree that UVA student Yan Ren’s visualization of killer whale kinematics and wake is a worthy winner of Tecplot’s 2016 Plot Contest.

3D kinematics and unsteady wake structure of a fast swimming killer whale by Yan Ren. Image from Tecplot. See link above.

Bonus: MIT students make a sculpture out of water.

P.S. I hope you like this “husky” version of This Week in CFD because we’re going to skip next week and publish next on 13 May. And there’s something else interesting on the calendar for that day – besides being Friday the 13th – that we’ll say more about later.

Creepy “Friday the 13th” Edition

News from Pointwise

• For those of you with an hour to spare, a recording of this morning’s Talking CFD Live Q&A Roundtable is available on YouTube.  Yours truly was one of the panelists for a discussion that ranged from AI to democratization and everything in between. The 11 episodes of this podcast series are archived at Talking CFD.
• Desktop Engineering’s article on Notes from the Mesh-Making Frontline delves into the question of exactly how hidden meshing should be.
• On May 25th we’re hosting a Let’s Talk Meshing webcast on Localized Remeshing Strategies for Parametric Models. Please join us.
• The Call for Papers (abstracts due 01 July) and Registration (free!) are now open for the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016 (21-22 September in Fort Worth).

Applications

CFD simulation by SC/Tetra of a cerebral aneurysm. Image from Altair. Click image for article.

• Read this for the title alone: time to stop hero-worshipping the wind tunnel (from Exa).
• Validating CFD for prediction of floods.
• Video of a CFD simulation of a stove’s vent hood. [If I recall correctly, the visualization is done using EnSight.]
• Jacobs Analytics is developing a new state of the art Barbecue Smoker using ANSYS CFX Computational Fluid Dynamics. See image below. [Delicious!]
• A very complete, basic article walking-through use of SolidWorks Flow Simulation for flow through a pipe.
• CFD for oil tankers and ferries.
• Check out this video of jet engine noise simulated using CFD. [And it was computed on 1 million cores.]
• Jeff Bezos explains how CFD will prevent Blue Origin’s engine from melting. [I wonder about his thoughts on meshing.] See image below.

ANSYS CFX simulation of a BBQ smoker. Image from Travis Jacobs. See link above.

Software

• ThermoAnalytics has introduced CoTherm, software that couples the company’s TAITherm with CFD codes STAR-CCM+, Fluent, and more.
• You can read about global adaptive meshing in MSC Software’s MARC.
• CAESES now supports “colored IGES and STEP formats” for closer coupling of design, meshing, and CFD software.
• Beta CAE released v16.2.0 of its software suite.
• EnSight Version 10.1.6d was launched.

Business & Events

• Concepts NREC and Numeca have agreed to combine their products offerings to the turbomachinery industry.
• ANSYS earned $225.9 million in Q1 with software license revenue up only 1% (as reported by Monica Schnitger). This includes one order in excess of $10 million.
• ESI earned revenue of €54.9 million in their Q4 with license revenue up 15%. [Thanks again, Monica.]
• Enter and you might win the Tell Us Your Moldex3DStory contest.

CFD simulation results of Blue Origin’s rocket engine. Image from Popular Science. See link above.

Events

• The 20th Australasian Fluid Mechanics Conference will be held in Perth on 05-08 December 2016. The CFP is open with abstracts due 20 May.
• The 4th annual OpenFOAM User Conference 2016 will be held in Cologne on 11-13 October.
• The 2016 FLOW-3D Americas User Conference will be held in Chicago on 22 September.
• The Converge User Conference 2016 will be held in Madison, WI on 26-30 September. Abstracts are due 01 July and attendee registration is now open.
• The OpenVSP Workshop 2016 will be held at NASA Ames on 23-25 August.

Art and Technology

On 12 April 2016, I was fortunate to be in the audience for an hour-long discussion with Frank Stella whose retrospective is currently on display at The Modern into September. A screen capture from a video recording of that interview is shown below with Stella on the right and Michael Auping, The Modern’s chief curator, on the left.

A recent Stella work is shown in the upper left of the frame and what interested me was that it was designed in CAD and 3D printed. Part of it even has a mesh-like appearance. Stella quoted painter Willem De Kooning as saying “Painting is about flatness but where’s the volume? You have to paint the volume.” He referred to his own recent works as 3D paintings rather than sculptures.

I found that thread of commonality to be quietly thrilling. A lot of abstract painting, Stella’s included, conveys a sense of disrupting the plane of the canvas by creating depth either to draw us in or to reach out to us. For us too in CFD, we’re breaking out of the plane of our computer screens to model 3D physical systems. To know that CAD (and meshing to a degree since 3D printing likely involves an STL file at some point) is a common point of reference for both our work meant that I could probably have a quasi-intelligent conversation with him given the chance. That’s unlike conventional painting in which their process is quite elusive to me such that I could only come up with a dullard question like the typical one asked of musicians, “Do you write the music or lyrics first?”

Screen capture from the video interview of Frank Stella whose retrospective recently opened at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Click image for video.

Bonus: Even though this tongue-in-cheek article is written about sys admins, engineers in CFD should read it too. How SysAdmins Devalue Themselves

The AIAA Meshing, Visualization, and Computational Environments technical committee is surveying the CFD community about their opinions and experiences with geometry and mesh generation prior to a panel discussion on that topic at AIAA Aviation in Washington, DC on Tuesday 14 June.

Can you please take 5-10 minutes to share your insight with us? The link to the survey is https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HSC9PK7.

The survey results will be shared with the session’s attendees and used to formulate questions and conversation starters for the panel discussion.

Thank you in advance for participating. And I hope to see many of you at AIAA  Aviation.

Special Memorial Day 3-Day Weekend Edition

Meshing

• Please take 5 minutes to share your thoughts on geometry preparation and mesh generation in this survey. The results will be used as part of the basis for a panel discussion to be held at AIAA Aviation next month on open issues in meshing. [Thank you.]
• Read about how to find regions of poor mesh quality using CONSELF.
• DEVELOP3D reports that Autodesk’s Project Memento is now a commercial product called ReMake for converting images into 3D meshes.
• Rhino Rotorblade, a plugin for generating airfoils, wings, and rotors, is now available as v2.00.

Gratuitous grid picture. Remember when CFD and a Gridgen grid were on a USPS express mail stamp?

News and Events

• CD-adapco reveals how their product development dovetails with NASA’s CFD Vision 2030 Study in the aerospace and defense markets. [See, I’m not the only one reading that study.]
• CD-adapco also announced the first North American Vehicle CFD Conference, to be held in Detroit on 02 June.
• EnSight introduced a new Resources area on their website with assets, downloads, videos, and tutorials.

Reading

• This should probably scare all of us: reproducing CFD results is horrendously difficult because “computational science and engineering lacks an accepted standard of evidence.” [Kudos for use of the word “boffins” in this article.]
• Technavio projects a 12% annual growth rate of the global simulation and analysis software market from 2016-2020, driven primarily by its ability to reduce time to market.

Grab A Mesh By Its Tail

Alert reader J.P. shared the overtly faceted and meshed graphic design of Dallas Theater Three’s production of Tigers Be Still, a comedy. Whether comedy and meshing are related is unknown. I have contacted the theater company for insight.

Bonus: How chilling with Brian Eno Changed the Way I Study Physics. Excerpted from the Jazz of Physics, it’s another example of how the arts and sciences are more alike than different. Eno’s music has always been of part of my listening repertoire. Example: Eno and Budd’s 1980 masterpiece, Ambient 2.

Today’s post was more complex to write than normal because Chrome decided to re-organize my bookmarks for me. Thanks, Google! Granted, I probably have a few more bookmarks than the typical web browser, but still.

News

• You have until 30 June to submit your entry for the first FloEFD Frontloading CFD Award.
• Abstracts for ESI’s 4th Annual OpenFOAM User Conference are due 30 June. Also noted, they will be previewing overset capabilities due for release in 2017.
• Is there a Moore’s Law for mesh elements? This article from Desktop Engineering says “no” for structural mechanics but leaves the door open for CFD. Anyone care to review several years of meshes and report the results?
• Exa‘s performance during the first quarter yielded some interesting nuggets, as per industry analyst Monica Schnitger. [IMO, we should all take an interest in Exa because they are the only publicly traded pure CFD company (at least that I’m aware of).]
  • Total revenue was $16.8 million, with license revenue up 15%.
  • All of Exa’s project work is now done via ExaCLOUD and the implication was that new customers who start with project work use the cloud-based product once they decide to license (as opposed to the desktop product).
  • It was reported that Exa’s cloud and desktop products are priced and structured the same way.

Applications

6SigmaET and Rescale are partnering on thermal simulation in the cloud. Image from Eureka Magazine. Click image for article.

• Always check your propellers for damages [sic] and balance before flight, or so says this news item for Master Airscrew‘s CFD-designed and pre-balanced drone propellers.
• CFD helps design air filtration units for computer labs and classrooms.
• Something about a computer optimized for cloud-based HPC applications like CFD.
• Symbolic IO announced “computationally defined” computer storage.
• Something that sounds similar is IBM’s phase-change storage which is supposedly 50 times faster than flash storage.

From Pointwise

• There’s still time to participate in the AIAA survey on the topic of geometry handling and mesh generation for CFD. The results will be used as part of a panel discussion on open issues in meshing at AIAA Aviation. It should only take you 5-10 minutes to complete the survey so please participate today if you haven’t done so already. Share it with your friends too.
• What’s the best part of the Pointwise User Group Meeting? There are many, but mine is recognizing the winner of The Meshy Award. Candidates are due 05 August.

Simulation of grilling a steak. Click image for more info.

Software

• MSC Software released Nastran and Patran 2016.
• These tips on how to read a scientific paper range from “start with the abstract” to “re-derive everything yourself.”
• Friendship Systems (the CAESES people) are partnering with R&D CFD to advance simulation of internal combustion engines.
• Also, CAESES 4.1.1 was released.

Animated Meshes

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of animation, especially black and white line drawing. When you combine that with a hint of faceting or polygonal play, you’ve got me hooked. Such is the case with Daniel Savage’s video Look-See that I first encountered on Cartoon Brew. You can read about how he made it and see more of his work.

Daniel Savage’s video captures how it feels sometimes when you’re meshing. Click image for video.

Bonus: This really has nothing to do with meshing or CFD but a student’s work on designing 3-sided dice (“trice“) is really innovative.

I’m Brian Mack and This Is How I Glyph.

My internship with Pointwise kicked-off this past spring while I was finishing up the spring semester of my junior year at the University of Texas at Arlington. My first assignment was to help a user update an existing Glyph script they had written for use with Gridgen, so that they could continue to leverage it within Pointwise. The script creates a constant-pitch helical connector around any of the three principal axes, and allows users to easily create connectors around a conical or cylindrical object.

The script presents users with a graphical Tk interface where they can specify x-, y-, and z- coordinates for starting and ending points; a principal rotation axis; and a dimension for the resulting connector. The XYZ values for either point can be provided via the available entry fields, or by selecting the point directly from the Display window within Pointwise. Radio buttons are provided, so that users can toggle between the three principal axes to be used for rotation.

Once all of the parameters have been provided, the connector as-defined can be previewed in the Display window by clicking the Create Connector button. The resulting connector’s orientation can be changed, which reverses its starting and ending points. Clicking Apply saves the connector and allows users to continue creating additional helical connectors, while clicking OK will save any connectors created and exit the script. Values entered are retained and can be re-used when creating multiple connectors.  Users can exit the script at any time by clicking Cancel.

To download this script directly, you can use this link. To learn more about this script or contribute changes, visit the project’s repository on GitHub.

If you have an idea for a new Glyph script, and you would like to learn more about how to get started, then contact us via the comments section below or contact @Pointwise on Twitter. We’re also interested in learning more about the Glyph scripts our users have created. Get in touch with us if you would like to share and have your script highlighted here on Another Fine Mesh.

Software

• modeFRONTIER 2016 is now available for multidisciplinary simulations.
• EnSight‘s FAQ for July 2016 includes tips on their calculator and blanked elements.
• Engineering.com shares some of what’s coming in Polygonica v1.4: new remeshing and point cloud tools.
• Taking shortcuts on geometry prep can negatively affect your CFD results. ANSYS shares tips on how to prepare geometry for CFD.
• The KUBRIX mesher is now available as a Rhino-plugin.
• You can now build boundaries for ANSYS in CAESES.
• DEVELOP3D delves into COMSOL Multiphysics 5.2.

Example of remeshing in Polygonica v1.4. Image from Engineering.com. See link above. (Note: Not Pokemans [sic].)

Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016

It’ll be here before you know it. Join us in Fort Worth, Texas on 21-22 September for the Pointwise User Group Meeting.

• Day 1 is replete with seminars on the latest meshing techniques in Pointwise. Come and sharpen your tool set and consult with our expert engineers. Day 1 ends with a Welcome Reception for all attendees.
• Day 2 is your opportunity to share your work in CFD using Pointwise, to learn from others doing the same, and hear from us about what’s happening in mesh generation. Day 2 ends with a fun after-party that you won’t want to miss.

Don’t delay; take action today.

• The Call for Papers is open with a deadline of 22 July.
• Enter to win the Meshy Award by 05 August.
• Registration is open and the special hotel room rate expires on 26 August.

Hardware & CAD

• Quantum HPC, provider of computing resources for CFD and CAE,  launched the Quantum HPC Portal for controlling jobs run on a remote computer.
• HPCwire seeks nominations for their 2016 reader’s choice awards. Cast your votes by 12 August.
• You can help Tech Clarity identify how CAD can get better by participating in their Looking at the Future of CAD survey.  Participants get a copy of the survey results and some might even win an Amazon gift card.

Example simulation results from COMSOL Multiphysics 5.2. Image from DEVELOP3D. See link above.

News

• The Call for Papers for the 2016 FLOW-3D Americas Users Conference is now open with a due date coming up in two weeks (29 July).
• Here’s a very nice article from Engineering.com for engineering managers that touches on many of the issues and benefits related to expanding the use of simulation.
• Sandia National Labs seeks to hire a Mesh Generation Scientist (Experienced).

Generating Meshes (Artfully) by Hand

Alert reader Jeff directed me to the artwork of Katy Ann Gilmore whose oeuvre includes captivating drawings like the one below composed of triangles. On her website she explains her interest in the relationship between 2D and its distortion into 3D.

Check out Ms. Gilmore’s work on her Instagram page and on her website where you’ll find works for sale. Her murals are tempting.

I wonder whether she knows she’s meshing?

Artist Katy Ann Gilmore has a unique drawing style.

Bonus: Seems like they’re everywhere.

Yes, this is a Pokemon. Thanks to GrabCAD for the geometry model.

Reading

• Meshing and preprocessing [Are they the same thing? Does pre- include meshing?] are a big part of the free, no-registration report from Tech Clarity on Addressing the Bottlenecks of FEA Simulation.
  • Pre-processing is the largest time component of simulation, requiring 38%. [Which is better than the oft-quoted 75% for CFD.]
  • The best practices of high performers in this area include prioritizing automation while retaining control.
• Vox wrote about the seven biggest problems facing science. “[Scientists’] careers are being hijacked by perverse incentives.”  #4 Peer review is broken. [I’ll be interested to read your thoughts on this topic in the comments.]

Gratuitous mesh image.

Pointwise News

• We’re conducting a 3-question survey on how you use Pointwise to generate your CFD meshes. Can you spend a minute (literally) to take it?
• Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016, 21-22 September, Fort Worth
  • Attendee registration is open – reserve your spot today
  • Abstracts due TODAY
  • Meshy Award entries are due on 05 August
  • Special hotel room rate expires on 26 August

Applications & Events

• Planet X’s new time trial bike EXO3 was streamlined with the aid of CFD.
• Same story, different names: Bianchi’s Oltre XR4 road bike.
• The Siemens Simcenter Symposium 2016 will be in Troy, Michigan on 13-14 September.
• You have until July 29th to get your abstract submitted for the 2016 FLOW-3D Americas Users Conference.
• The global CFD market is forecast to grow at 13.6% through 2019.

Software

• Autodesk is offering a technology preview of Project Calrissian for CFD, a mashup of Autodesk Flow Design and Project Ventus for CFD.
• Beta CAE announced v17.0.0 of their software suite.
• Those of us who program/programmed for a living will probably enjoy looking at the source code from the Apollo 11 guidance computer.

Finding Meshes in Art IRL

There’s nothing like viewing great works of art with your own eyes. And it’s a bonus when you [OK, when I] can find meshes in them. That’s exactly what happened yesterday when I toured The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth with two visiting CFD luminaries. (Yes, there are more CFDers than just me who appreciate modern and contemporary art.) We were there primarily for the Frank Stella Retrospective but also explored the museum’s permanent collection on the second floor.

Stella’s more recent work involves CAD software and 3D printing which means that I might be able to have a quasi-intelligent conversation with him about his process. (Unlike paint on canvas about which I know vastly less.) What’s shown below is a detailed view of one of Stella’s painting/collages that incorporates a lot of mesh-like components.

Frank Stella, close-up detail. (I forgot the name of the painting.)

The Modern’s collection includes a massive work by Mark Bradford who, like another favorite painter of mine Callum Innes, uses a reductive technique. Whereas Innes uses turpentine or something similar to remove paint, Bradford uses a sander to carve down into layers of material he previously applied.

Mark Bradford, close-up detail. (I forgot the name of the painting.)

Darrin Stephens, Managing Director, Applied CCM Pty Ltd.

I was born and raised in Innisfail, a small country town in the far north of the state of Queensland, Australia. Being in the far north, Innisfail was hot and humid where the rainfall each year is measured in meters. The local industry was mostly agriculture with the crops being sugar, banana and papaya.

I started programming when I was in high school (~1989), after our family purchased an Amstrad 464. It had a whopping 64K of memory and used audio cassettes as the storage medium. I recall spending many hours copying lines of basic code from tutorial books only to have the tape get corrupted and lose everything. I’m sure there are a few people out there that have experienced this with tape storage.

My father was a motor mechanic, which meant I was exposed to all thing mechanical during my childhood. My motivation for becoming an engineer was driven by me not wanting to become a motor mechanic. I studied Mechanical Engineering at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland and was awarded my bachelor’s degree in 1996. I continued on to do a Ph.D. at the same University, completing in 2001. My doctoral thesis titled ’Studies on Modelling Circulation in Sugar Vacuum Pans’ investigated the circulation and heat transfer occurring in sugar crystallization vessels through development of a computational fluid dynamics model of the system. This study involved the use of CFX-4, which included modification and development of various FORTRAN source code subroutines of CFX-4 relating to multiphase flow and boiling. Townsville was also where I met my wife.

After leaving University, I joined the Sugar Research Institute (SRI) located in Mackay, Queensland. I was only at SRI for two years before the impending birth of my first child took me way south to Melbourne, Victoria to be closer to my wife’s family. I joined Australian Trade Development in 2003, the Australian agent for the CFX software (owned by AEA Technology at the time) and FieldView. In this role I managed all technical support in Australasia and South East Asia for more than 50 separate customers, delivered training courses and coordinated marketing and sales. I was also responsible for providing consultation services on a range of CFD related topics. The acquisition of CFX by ANSYS saw me leave Australian Trade Development to join the Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organisation (CSIRO). At CSIRO I worked in the Minerals division developing numerical models for a range of hydrometallurgical unit processes, involving multiple phases and complex physics.

In 2011, I took the bold step to start Applied CCM as I could see that the needs of new and current users in the field of Computational Continuum Mechanics were not being met by the large commercial providers such as ANSYS and CD-adapco. At the same time I could see a growing interest in open source CFD software such as OpenFOAM®, however, local support for OpenFOAM was lacking. The start of Applied CCM also heralded the partnership with Pointwise, Inc. as Applied CCM became the Pointwise distributor for Australia and New Zealand. Mesh generation is an extremely important part to any CFD simulation, a part that is often not given the attention it needs. Mesh quality is where the CFD analyst has the largest impact on solution quality. A high quality mesh increases the accuracy of the CFD solution and improves convergence relative to a poor quality mesh. Therefore, it’s important for mesh generation software to provide the tools for the CFD analyst to inspect and control the quality of the meshes being generated, Pointwise was the most logical choice.

In 2014, Applied CCM released the first version of Caelus as an alternative to OpenFOAM. The reasons behind the development of Caelus have been discussed in the blog articles here and here. In 2015 Applied CCM Pty Ltd and Applied CCM Canada signed partnership agreements with Celeritas Simulation Technologies LLC for worldwide sales and support of the Suggar++ overset grid assembly software.

• Location: Melbourne, Australia.
• Current position: Managing Director, Applied CCM Pty Ltd.
• Current computer: Lenovo laptop 64-bit Intel i7 CPU with 32 GB RAM (Windows 10), Macbook Air 64-bit Intel i7 CPU and 8 GB RAM (Yosemite), Supermicro workstation dual 64-bit Intel Xeon CPU with 256 GB RAM (Ubuntu 12.04) and 200 64-bit Intel Xeon core cluster with 928 GB RAM (Red Hat 6.7).
• One word that best describes how you work: Determined.

What software or tools do you use every day?

• For emails I use Microsoft Outlook and a web browser I use Google Chrome.
• Pointwise for grid generation.
• Caelus for CFD simulations.
• For report writing, a combination of Latex and Microsoft Word (depending on the client).
• For development:
  • For editing I use either Notepad++ or Gedit (depending on operating system). I sit on the fence in the vi versus Emacs
  • For code documentation I use Sphinx.
  • For version control I use git teamed with Bitbucket.
  • For compiling I use gcc on Linux, clang on Mac and MinGW on Windows. Using different compliers is a must for finding those weird coding errors.

What does your workspace look like?

Darrin’s current workspace.

I have a lot of monitors connecting to my various computers. All computers use a common keyboard and mouse via the Synergy software. Occasionally, I have a mouse plague on my desk as Synergy is not fool proof. My desk is usually covered with Journal papers and bits of code, I cleaned it up just for the photo. As a Star Wars fan I have a few nick knacks taking up some desk space.

What do you see are the biggest challenges facing CFD in the next 5 years?

I’m going to nominate two challenges for CFD in the next 5 years.

The first is related to meshing, in particular handling of large meshes. Problem sizes are only getting bigger, helped by improvements in parallel computing and the reduction in hardware costs. The generation of large meshes isn’t the issue, I have generated a 1.2 billion cell mesh using the current version of Pointwise on my workstation. However, meshing is still predominately a serial process. The meshing software generates a single mesh that is further processed, renumbered and decomposed before being used in the flow solver. This approach just isn’t going to work for the billion cell+ meshes of the future. The challenge isn’t going to be meshing in parallel, there are already algorithms that accommodate this. The real challenge is going to be generating a mesh in parallel that can be directly used in the flow solver without the need for further processing.

The second issue is education, or dare I say the lack of it. Since its inception, CFD has become a very powerful tool with improvements in accuracy, robustness and the complexity of problems that can be tackled. The addition of user interfaces to CFD software has made it easier to use, to the point where education (at least in my country) has begun focusing on the interface and not the tool itself. I’m not going to mention the “D” word, but with a push in that direction, I believe there should be more importance on education finding the balance between teaching “how to click the buttons” and “what the buttons actually do”.

What are you currently working on?

The biggest task I’m undertaking at the moment is adding rigid body motion to our overset library that utilizes Suggar++ and works with Caelus. In addition to that I’m undertaking development of improvements to the Volume of Fluid (interFoam) Solver in OpenFOAM for a customer.

What would you say is your meshing specialty?

I’m not sure I have a specialty, however, I do seem to attract problems requiring large (hundreds of million elements) and unusual meshing approaches.

Any tips for our users?

Subscribe to the Pointwise YouTube channel where you will find numerous videos containing very useful information. Aside from that I’ll repeat what others have said, ask questions, we are here to help you get the most out of the software.

What project are you most proud of and why?

Choosing a project I’m proud of is like picking your favorite child, they all have their unique qualities.

It was a difficult choice, but I have one that stands out from the others because of the complexity involved. During my time at CSIRO I got to work on some very challenging problems, the most challenging and rewarding at the same time was modelling the bath dynamics in the HIsmelt reduction vessel for iron production (a copy of the paper can be found here). This model involved multiple phases, with multiple reacting species in various thermodynamic states (solid, liquid and gas). The modelling work was done using a custom version of ANSYS-CFX developed in-conjunction with staff at ANSYS-UK and involved lots of FORTRAN code.

What CFD solver and postprocessor do you use most often?

Being one of the developers of Caelus means it is my go to solver. However, I still run various versions of OpenFOAM when providing support to our customers. For post-processing I share my time between ParaView and FieldView.

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

I have a very long reading list. There are two papers that have my attention at the moment:

• “DiRTlib: A Library to Add an Overset Capability to Your Flow Solver”, Ralph W. Noack, 17th AIAA Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference, June 6-9 2006, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
• “Green-Guass/Weighted-Least-Squares Hybrid Gradient Reconstruction for Arbitrary Polyhedra Unstructured Grids”, E Shima, K Kitamura and T. Haga, AIAA Journal, Vol 51(11), 2013.

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

In September I’ll be attending the Pointwise User Group Meeting in Fort Worth, USA. In October you will find me at the 13th Symposium on Overset Composite Grids and Solution Technology Mukilteo, USA. Closer to home, I’ll be attending the 20th Australasian Fluid Mechanics Conference in Perth, Australia in December.

What do you do outside the world of CFD?

There is a world outside CFD?

Just kidding, when not doing CFD you will find me with the family or renovating the house. The renovations have taken a while, long enough that by the time I finish it will be time to start again.

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

The best advice came during my PhD. I was using a commercial CFD solver and the results were rubbish (non-mass conserving). My supervisor told me “Just because you paid for it, doesn’t mean it will be correct”. I had made the mistake of assuming that money == validation/verification. After undertaking my own validation exercises I was able to prove there was a bug in the software that was the cause for the incorrect results. From that point on I have been on a validation and verification crusade.

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

Melbourne is very multicultural so you can get any type of food you desire. We usually go to a local restaurant (The Dandenong Pavillion) for a burger. If you want some entertainment then you cannot go past The Cuckoo where you get to yodel and partake in some German slap dancing.

Awards, Contests, and Events

• Proving that you never know who’ll be talking about CFD next, Jeff Bezos tweeted that Blue Origin’s recent wind tunnel tests of the New Glenn rocket helped validate their CFD simulations.
• ANSYS seeks your simulation results by 04 November to compete for inclusion in the ANSYS Hall of Fame.
• The Kantar Visualization is Beautiful awards published their long list of finalists including the data visualization category.
• Have you ever considered publishing your CFD results to 3D PDF? Engineers Rule writes about how to get started with 3D PDF.

Computing

• Microsoft announced the addition to Azure of some H-series virtual machines that will be useful for running CFD simulations.
• Is container technology the key to bringing HPC closer to every engineer?

Use of CFD for the design of filtration devices. Image from filtsep.com. Click image for article.

Events & Computing

• CEI announced two upcoming events.
  • CEI announced that EnSight 10.2 will be demonstrated publicly at AIAA SciTech in the DFW area this January. The software will be released this fall making SciTech one of the first public demos.
  • P.S. Pointwise will be at AIAA SciTech 2017.
  • CEI also announced their Japanese User Group Meeting in Tokyo on 04 November.
• SC16, the supercomputing conference, announced that the team from Imperial College is a finalist for best paper and the Gordon Bell Prize: Toward Green Aviation with Python at Petascale (with PyFR).
• Fortissimo, an EU project designed to provide pay-per-use, on-demand simulation to small and medium-sized enterprises has issued a call for proposals seeking “modelling and simulation of coupled physical processes and high-performance data analytics (HPDA) and in all cases targeting benefits for engineering and manufacturing SMEs.”
• FloEFD Simulation Conference 2016, the inaugural global event for this CFD software, will be held 08-09 November in Frankfurt.

Meshing

• If you ever need to manually map-mesh a plate with a hole, here’s how.
• Version 1.2 of BlockRanger, a hex mesh generating plugin for Rhino, was released. (See image below.)
• Also for Rhino, reverse engineering plugin Mesh2Surface 4.2 was released.
• TwinMesh 2016, the latest version of the “revolutionary meshing solution for reliable CFD analysis of rotary positive displacement machines,” has been released.

Visualization & Other Software

• Beta CAE launched v17.0.1 of their software suite.
• Tecplot launched Tecplot RS 2016 for visualization of oil reservoir simulations.
• HPCCloud v0.9, a web-based simulation environment, was launched for running simulations (e.g. PyFR) on a cloud provider (e.g. Amazon EC2).

Example of a hex mesh generated using BlockRanger. Image from rhino3d.com. See link above.

Escape to Art

As is my habit, I took time while in Washington, DC for the International Meshing Roundtable, to visit the National Gallery of Art – East Building which coincidentally reopened to the public on the day of my visit after a 3-year renovation. I was lucky enough to have the company of two other IMR refugees and a spouse.

(One of my rules of social media is that if I erase what I’ve typed twice, I don’t write anything at all. I just failed at three attempts to describe the dazzling effect of the remodeled building and the arrangement of artwork. Therefore, here are some pictures with mesh-like aspects. I’ll remind you that I’m a poor photographer and have a bad habit of forgetting to photograph the nameplates beside works I’m not familiar with.)

National Gallery of Art – East Building

Ellsworth Kelly

Rachel Whiteread

I believe the work on the right is by Donald Judd.

Agnes Martin

If anyone wants to sneak out of SciTech 2017 to visit The Modern in Fort Worth (and maybe get some Tex-Mex along the way), just let me know.

Bonus: The fluid dynamics aspects of floating, preening, swimming, spitting and sneezing.

Software

• Siemens PLM Software announced the release of STAR-CCM+ v11.06 which includes a toolset for electronics cooling. [Still seems odd to not be writing “CD-adapco announced…”]
• Speaking of electronics cooling, Coolit v16 was recently released with CAD import and turbulence modeling improvements.
• modeFrontier is now available for use with PowerFLOW from within ExaCLOUD, Exa’s SaaS environment for CFD, and now optimization.
• Rhino announced the plugin RhinoCFD Beta from CHAM for performing CFD simulations inside Rhino’s geometry modeling environment.
• Engineering.com writes about the latest release of CAESES and the benefits of having an independent optimization tool in your CFD arsenal.
  • This article is also notable for deciphering the CAESES acronym (CAE System Empowering Simulation) and its use of the word “whilst” not once but twice.
• Mentor Graphics announced the only CFD tool that’s fully embedded in Solid Edge, FloEFD for Solid Edge, that promises a 65-75% reduction in overall simulation time relative to other CFD tools.

Coolit v16 includes a trace heating feature for printed circuit boards. Image from Daat. See link above.

Events

• The SIAM Conference on Industrial and Applied Geometry will be held 10-12 July 2017 in Pittsburgh. Abstracts are due 01 February.
• NAFEMS is offering a 1-day seminar on A Guide to High Fidelity CFD on 16 November in Stratford-upon-Avon in the UK. The seminar promises to touch on the roles of grid generation, high performance computing and turbulence modeling.
• Tech Clarity is taking a survey on CAD tools and some survey respondents may be rewarded with an Amazon gift card. Why not take 10-15 minutes and help them out by sharing your experiences?

Good Reads

• Our friends at Engineering.com also announced a freely available eBook (registration required) on Turbulence Models Offered by CFD Simulation Vendors. [If you read this report, let me know what you think of it.]
• Remember the article posted here a while back about the 5 categories of CFD software? The Momentum Analysis blogs delves a bit further into the topic and promises more on pre- and post-processing tools in a future post.
• Available now for Kindle is the Airfoil Primer for Non-Aerodynamicists. [Full disclosure: the author is a co-worker.]

Meshing & Visualization

• The EnSight FAQ for October 2016 includes a tip on creating uniform grid for clipping.
• Also from EnSight is this article on using EnSight for virtual reality.
• FEA for All presents 7 wrong beliefs about meshing. “#3 Automeshing is the best way to mesh 3D solid models.”
• The phrase “digital mesh” in this article from Beyond PLM isn’t what I thought it was at first, but the idea of how people and things will interact is still worth reading. [Plus, the article includes the gratuitous mesh image shown below.]

The world’s digital mesh. Image from Beyond PLM. See link above.

Faceted Mickey

I’m gonna milk my recent travel for all it’s worth by sharing this t-shirt design of a faceted Mickey Mouse. No, I did not buy it.

Facets are everywhere, even on this recently spied t-shirt of Mickey Mouse.

Quentin Lux, President, Quantum HPC.

My name is Quentin and I am French guy from France. I have always been fascinated by aerodynamics. My first ambition as far as I remember was to become a Formula 1 aerodynamicist because I was amazed by the level of technology associated with this field (that make them stick to the road). I decided to study engineering in the heart of European aeronautics and aerospace (ISAE: Aerospace institute in Toulouse) because I told myself that the rules to make a plane fly were the same as to make a Formula 1 vehicle stick. During my education, I stumbled upon CFD and, as a profound computer geek/nerd, I fell completely in love. I was finally able to combine both of my worlds. I did a lot of structured meshing using ICEM and a lot of CFD using ANSYS Fluent. I continued my education here in Canada in Montréal and worked in a university lab for Bombardier (IDEA Chair: Integrated Design toward Efficient Aircraft at Polytechnique Montréal) where I continued my passion for perfect meshes on full aircraft configurations. My first position after my education was for an ANSYS partner, SimuTech Group, as a CFD Engineer doing consulting projects while providing support and training for ANSYS. I learned a lot and worked with a great team here in Montreal. I quickly started playing with large clusters, connecting machines together to get more power, optimizing, scripting, using job scheduler (because sadly I had to share my toys…) and I rapidly realized that most of the users have a very limited knowledge in that matter, or they do not have the time to learn about it. At first I was just giving advice on what to buy and how to configure small servers, but it was taking more and more time. So, with SimuTech we decided that I should pursue this on my own and I started my own company, Quantum HPC and offer complementary services to theirs. For a little more than a year now I propose services and HPC servers for CFD and FEA users and have become the official hardware partner of SimuTech Montréal.

• Location: Québec City, QC, Canada
• Current position(s): IT, Technician, Technical Support, System builder, Developer, Secretary, HR, Accountant, Manager, Boss and employee
• Current computer:
  • Personal computer: Intel i7 960, 8Gb DDR3
  • Dev server: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (still very good for servers), 8gb of DDR3 Fedora 22 Server
• One word that best describes how you work: do-it-yourself

How do you know Pointwise?

I have tested several meshers, commercial and open-source, and am a follower of the hex mesh religion. I rapidly stumbled upon Pointwise because very few tools in the market offer blocking-based meshing (the other is ICEM I suppose?). I have to admit that I don’t have a lot of experience with Pointwise, but I am a fervent reader of your blog posts and especially “This Week in CFD” because it is always a pleasure to know what is going on in the more-than-discreet CFD scene.

What do you see are the biggest challenges facing CFD in the next 5 years?

Democratization! I know it’s really different in the US, but for what I have seen in Canada, proposing CFD sometimes feels like selling an electric car:  it’s more efficient, it has a lot of advantages, and in the end it will cost less money but … “I’m good with what I have.” CFD is a powerful and underutilized tool, but things are changing fast. Along with the democratization, a lot of training has to be done to prevent the misuse of the CFD. Performing CFD in aerospace, I worked a lot on the importance of the boundary layer, the length of the farfield, even the sensitivity analysis on just the turbulent viscosity ratio in the farfield, and everything has a meaning and its own importance. Of course this isn’t true for all applications and it depends on the field, but there is a popular sentence in CFD that goes like: “garbage in, garbage out.” Democratization of CFD (and FEA), a wider range of courses in universities, access to information, and effective hardware and software support will result in a better understanding of this field.

What are you currently working on?

I am currently developing an HPC front-end for job schedulers capable of connecting to every job scheduler available on the market (Torque, PBS Pro, Windows HPC, LSF, OpenLava, Slurm, etc…) which will be available in two versions: a “regular” version for physical servers and a cloud version for clusters and send jobs to AWS, GCE or Azure. We are planning on releasing the self-service SaaS version based on AWS in a couple of months allowing one to easily deploy the required number of servers based on the number of cores and memory demanded along with 3D-acceleration for pre- and post- based either on DCV or VirtualGl. As a day-to-day user of CFD and FEA applications, the goal was to create a really easy-to-use application allowing users to submit jobs to a bare-metal or cloud cluster and have access to output logs and residuals for monitoring simulations.

Apart from development, I support several clients with servers mostly running ANSYS and CD-Adapco tools, using Virtualization, Remote Desktop with DCV and job scheduling, and work closely with my clients to improve their infrastructure.

What project are you most proud of and why?

My company. Being able to do what I love every day while helping clients reach their goals is very gratifying. Every day I am challenged to find new solutions to interesting problems and have the opportunity to test everything and build solutions adapted to my clients needs and improve those solutions based on their feedback.

Concerning CFD, I am particularly proud of the research I did back at university for Bombardier where I performed the complete analysis of a full-aircraft for each angle of attack and yaw angle using several automated routines and scripts which included the generation of a large series of meshes.

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

Sadly I do not read a lot of technical papers nowadays. I find myself reading content from w3schools, StackOverflow, GitHub, API documentation, and other forums. I mostly need to learn about what my clients are using as an infrastructure in order to better support them.

What software or tools do you use every day?

• Mostly Cloud9 IDE for the development of our software, programming in Nodejs, HTML/CSS, Javascript/Angularjs, Bash, Python and Perl
• Docker for testing and developing, as well as libvirt and VirtualBox
• ownCloud for storage
• GitHub and Bitbucket for private code and public open-source code repos
• ANSYS and CD-Adapco with clients and for benchmarks
• NICE DCV, VNC, VirtualGL for remote desktop and support
• PBS Pro, Torque, Windows HPC, SLURM for job scheduling
• Freshdesk for support tickets
• OpenStack, AWS and Azure for cluster deployment
• MobaXterm and Putty for SSH
• Wave for finance, Bitrix for CRM and tasks, Outlook, Mailchimp for mailing lists, Google Analytics for SEO, and Excel for invoicing

What does your workspace look like?

Quentin’s current workspace.

My company is based at home for now and I access my servers from everywhere so I can move my workplace as I need. Mobility is the future where we can access our data and work from anywhere and commute only when we really need/want to. I can work from anywhere, but there is no place like home.

What do you do outside the world of CFD?

Starting a company…it takes some time! Outside that, we have recently moved to Québec City and I am trying to enjoy our beautiful Province. I am waiting on the winter for winter sports which includes snowboarding mostly, a little bit of ice skating and sledging, and chilling in the spa in -20C weather (it’s part of the sport!). Apart from that, one of my favorite hobbies is electronics, which is primarily audio equipment. I am a huge fan of high-end audio and especially tube amps which is at the opposite end of the digital world. I repair and build small audio equipment and I play with everything that you can repair.

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

“It’s good enough!” The trap in which most CFD/mesh users fall in, and where far too much time is spent, is our desire to always go deeper, more precise, and with more cells. In the end countless hours are spent for an unnoticeable difference. During a CFD analysis for an aircraft, in order to validate the results obtained using coarser meshes, I generated a 200 million cell grid. It took me weeks to adjust the blocking and generated the mesh in batch on a large-memory node. After a week or so running on 500 cores, I only had a 2% difference when compared with my 50 million cell grid, which itself had less than 1% difference with a 5 million cell grid. When the techniques and settings are appropriate, you can obtain “good enough” results using modest meshes. There is always a balance in CFD to achieve the best results in the required amount of time. This is why support during an analysis is crucial to challenge and discuss a case.

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

Our modest town of Québec City is beautiful and I really recommend The Chateau Frontenac. There is a beautiful veranda overlooking the St. Laurent which is completely frozen in winter and a nice fireplace. Also, the Auberge Saint-Antoine, built on the well-preserved ruins of the old-port, holds some really good jazz nights with very fine dishes. Call me when you get here and I’ll take you.

*** Last Post of 2016 ***

Software

• RealFlow introduced RealFlow 10. [And the video of its features is amazing.]
• Doyub Kim published Fluid Engine Development: a book, website, and source code.
• Disney, sugar, and CGI (aka poly-disperse granular media).
• Envenio updated the EXN/Aero feature list.

Applications

Symscape shared a round-up of their CFD simulations of 2016. Image from Symscape.

• Here’s SimScale’s review of 2016. (More than 80,000 users.)
• [I’m hoping to find time to] Read On The Role and Challenges of CFD in the Aerospace Industry (PDF) by Spalart and Venkatakrishnan (The Aeronautical Journal, January 2016, Vol. 120, No. 1223).
• Simulia patented a meshing technique for crack propagation.

News

• The biggest traditional news item of the week is MSC Software’s acquisition of Software Cradle, makers of the SC/Tetra, scSTREAM, and scFLOW solvers.
• On a related note, Software Cradle released scFLOW 13 with Oculus Rift support and improved preprocessing.
• Speaking of acquisitions, Digital Engineering writes that Siemens’ acquisition of EDA software from Mentor Graphics makes the company the “first to offer mechanical, thermal, electrical, electronic and embedded software design capabilities on a single, integrated platform.”
• An MIT Digital Fellow claimed “Platform beats product every time” at the recent Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE forum. While ostensibly about IoT, the essence of a platform is building a community (aka ecosystem) around a product suite that amplifies the benefits and experience by creating new pathways for interaction. [My interpretation, not his.]

Miscellaneous

• Here’s a brief write-up of the 20th Australasian Fluid Mechanics Conference from earlier this month. [Sorry if this is a repeat.]
• Here’s a brief read on hybrid parallelism for CFD from Various Consequences.
• Best of the visualization web for November 2016.

Art of the Grid & Grids IRL

Let’s end the last blog post of the year with an explosion of mesh-related visuals from the art world and the real world. [In other words, I’m cleaning out my bookmarks.]

Tessellated Origami by Goran Konjevod. source

Faceted Prosthetic Limb. source

Free Form Brick Structure. source

Wireframe Animals by Mat Szulik. source

Carrie Secrist Gallery’s booth at Expo Chicago. source

Uncertain Journey  by Chiharu Shiota. source

Happy New Year, everyone.

News & Views

• Aviation Week and AIAA have identified this year’s 20 Twenties, outstanding students who are emerging as aerospace leaders. [Is your alma mater represented?]
• DEVELOP3D shares more information about the photo-realistic simulation images from STAR-CCM+.
• Visualizing Data presents their best of the visualization web for January 2017.

Software

Example of hex meshing of runners in Moldex3D R 15.0. Image from Moldex3D. See link below.

• Moldex3D R 15.0 was released with new meshing capabilities (including automatic hex meshing for runners), a streamlined workflow, updated physical models, and more.
  • DEVELOP3D shares their thoughts on this new Moldex3D release.
• NASA’s Software Catalog has been updated to the 2017-2018 version and includes free and other-than-free software, a lot in CFD. A simple search for “CFD” yielded 35 results.
  • New to me is GFSSP, the Generalized Fluid System Simulation Program.
• simFlow 3.1 was released. This OpenFOAM-based CFD solver is available for Windows and Linux in both free and commercial versions. This new version includes new HPC capabilities and new physical models.
• Animated stream lines are coming in ParaView 5.3.
• Beta CAE released v17.1.0 of their software suite.
• Altair released HyperWorks 2017, their “platform for innovation.” New capabilities in this software are too numerous to mention so I’ll focus on one: an improved shrink-wrap mesher for CFD. See image below.

HyperMesh 2017 includes an improved shrink-wrap mesher for CFD. Image from Altair. See link above.

Events

• Coming this summer, the 1st AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop.
• The COMSOL Conference 2017 Boston will be held on 4-6 October. The call for papers is open and abstracts are due by 30 June.
• The Moldex3D Users’ Meeting 2017 – North America will be held 4-5 May in Plymouth, Michigan.

Art of the Grid

Without preamble, here’s a grid-like painting by Dan Walsh. The more I search, the more grid/mesh motifs I can find in painting. [So much for no preamble.]

Dan Walsh, Landing, 2010. Image from Paula Cooper Gallery. See link above.

Bonus: MIT Technology Review’s 10 breakthrough technologies for 2017 [mesh generation not included] does include “Botnets of Things,” the eyepatch-wearing evil twin of the Internet of Things.