Software
An adjoint method for conjugate heat transfer is coming in STAR-CCM+ v10.04. This image shows heat transfer on a cooled turbine blade. Image from CD-adapco. Click image for article.
- At least two of the nine projects for University Turbine Systems funded by the DoE’s National Energy Technology Lab involve CFD.
- Teach yourself graphics programming with OpenGL with the free online tutorial at OpenGLBook.com.
- cfMesh v1.1 was released for OpenFOAM meshing.
- GridPro 6.2 was released. [A little late on this news.]
- Tecplot announced a partnership with WaterCube for CUBEIT, powered by Tecplot, a software tool for visualizing, validating, and managing river, reservoir, and stream data. Tecplot is hosting a webinar on this topic on 02 July.
Applications and Events
This amazing image of a wind turbine wake comes from FieldView and is a teaser for how you can reduce data size by 3 orders of magnitude without loss of fidelity. Image from Intelligent Light. Click image for article.
- Registration is now open for the CONVERGE User Conference 2015.
- Best of the visualization web for April 2015.
- You can read about the workstation market in the latest report from Jon Peddie Research.
- Exa contributed to the use of CFD for the aero design of the Ligier JS P3 Le Mans car. [It’s when I see cool cars like that when I question why I’m not more of a motorsports fan.]
This truly puts the user in user interface. Tactum is a project by Madlab and Autodesk Research that lets you design wearables by drawing directly on your body and sending the result to a 3D printer. Anyone ready to mesh themselves? As first seen on SolidSmack. Click image for article.
Dealing with the Absence of Content
[aka Reading This Blog]
Artist Anish Kapoor has done it again. I first encountered his work when we at Pointwise took a tour of AT&T (aka Cowboys) Stadium here in Arlington, Texas. The Jones family has filled the venue with art – and not just paintings in private suites but huge installations throughout the facility for the enjoyment of all visitors.
One of the more recent acquisitions is Kapoor’s Sky Mirror, a 35 foot diameter polished stainless steel mirror.
This is a selfie of our Pointwise group reflected in Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror at AT&T Stadium.
A newer work by Kapoor is Decension, a dark, perpetually swirling whirlpool [swirlpool?]. Kapoor gives general insight into his work by saying he’s interested in unseen spaces, voids, and horizons. He ties Decension and Sky Mirror together this way [emphasis added by me]:
“The odd thing about removing content, in making space, is that we, as human beings, find it very hard to deal with the absence of content. It’s the horror vacui. This Platonic concept lies at the origin of the myth of the cave, the one from which humans look towards the outside world. But here there is also a kind of Freudian opposite image, that of the back of the cave, which is the dark and empty back of being. Your greatest poet, Dante, also ventured into a place like that. It is the place of the void, which paradoxically is full – of fear, of darkness. Whether you represent it with a mirror or with a dark form, it is always the “back”, the point that attracts my interest and triggers my creativity.” -Anish Kapoor
Read more about Decension here (including a video) and visit Kapoor’s website. I propose that any commercial CFD company should be proud to have this installed in their headquarters. It’s an apt metaphor for CFD – the fluid simulation and visualization is very cool but what concerns us most deeply is what lies beneath whether it be numerical algorithms or physical models.
And then there are those of us in meshing looking up from the bottom of the dark pool. Which let’s me end with a Nietzsche quote: “When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
Anish Kapoor, Decension. Image from Visual News.
[Sorry. This last bit was perhaps too much of a self-indulgent digression.]
