Above the Fold
- National Engineers Week is coming. This year’s celebration will be 19-25 February and its theme is based on the world population of 7 billion, representing 7 billion opportunities for engineers to turn dreams into reality.
- Monica Schnitger gained a little more insight into Mentor Graphic’s acquisition of 1D CFD vendor Flowmaster. “Flowmaster gets Mentor Graphics one step closer to real-time simulation, seen by many as the “holy grail” of CAE.” [I understand why Mentor Graphics acquired Flowmaster. But I still think calling it 1D CFD is a bit of a stretch. Am I being too narrow-minded?]
- The 3D PDF Consortium promotes the 3D PDF format as a standard format for 3D engineering data exchange. [Who's using it for CFD?]
- Cyon Research is surveying users of CAD and CAE software and if you participate you can get a copy ($2,000 value) for free. [Nasty software vendors like me gotta pay full price.
![:-(]()
] - Want to proclaim your allegiance to CD-adapco? Now you can sport their logo on all sorts of items from their Wearables Store.
]Learning
- Altair’s Dr. Farzin Shakib talks about why finite element based solvers are more accurate and about conservation in issues FE-based solvers in these two videos.
- Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden is offering a course on LES, DES, Hybrid LES/RANS, and URANS for Unsteady Flows on 27-29 June.
- The lectures from Boston University’s CFD course are available at YouTube.
Mobile Apps
- The upFront.eZine Newsletter covers mobile CAD apps and says the releases of many mobile CAD viewers are precursors to an eventual mobile CAD app (not just a viewer).
- Lattice Technology has released iXVL Player for viewing 3D CAD models on iOS. This is their second app of this type having released iXVL View last year.
- CadFaster‘s iOS app for viewing and markup of 3D models is available for free.
- TFTLabs announced the availability of their TFTPad mobile app for viewing 3D models on Android. A version for iOS is said to be in work.
CFD solution on an overset mesh in STAR-CCM+ v7.02. Image from Desktop Engineering.
New Releases
- CD-adapco added overset mesh capability and other features to STAR-CCM+ v7.02.
- nPowerSoftware released ScanToNURBS, software built upon IntegrityWare’s SOLIDS++ kernel that converts 3D scan data into NURBS geometry that can be imported into Autodesk’s 3ds Max and other CAD software.
- Coventor, a developer of software for microelectromechanical systems, introduced a new version of their CoventorWare suite including a hex-dominant extruded mesh generation capability.
- Reaction Design added particle size prediction capability to CHEMKIN-PRO, their software for simulating problems involving chemistry.
- CoreTech Systems released Moldex3D R11.0 for simulating injection molding. This latest release has improved mesh quality among other features.
- Altair launched Compute Manager, the first component of an eventual web-based interface for managing HPC jobs within their HyperWorks Enterprise platform.
- Symscape updated their free patch for OpenFOAM 2.1.x that provides Windows compatibility, 64-bit compilation, and parallel computation.
- MSC Software released Patran 2012 for finite element modeling and preprocessing.
- CGNS v3.1.3 release 4 is now available. CGNS is the standard, interoperable file format for CFD.
DeltaWing Le Mans race car
Application
- With CFD analysis complete, the new DeltaWing Le Mans race car is heading to the wind tunnel for verification testing.
Upcoming Events
- Engineering Design Forum 2012 will be held in San Diego, CA on 15-17 May with former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin delivering the keynote.
- The Conference on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES) will be held 12-15 April in Scottsdale, AZ. Dr. Alan Kay will keynote.
- The Avizo European User Group Meeting will be held in Bordeaux, France on 30 May – 01 June.
- Registration is now open for the Collaboration and Interoperability Congress to be held 21-23 May in Denver, CO.
- The ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition will be held on 9-15 Nov in Houston, TX.
