This Week in CFD

Stanford Releases CFD Tools as Open Source

Aircraft solution computed using SU2. Image from Stanford's Aerospace Design Lab.

The Aerospace Design Lab at Stanford University announced the open-source release of its C++ software tools for solving PDEs. The software suite is called SU² meaning Stanford University Unstructured and while it has been designed primarily for CFD it can be used for other applications such as electromagnetics.  The software computes the flow but also computes adjoint solutions, does gradient based optimization, and deforms the mesh.

One week after Stanford’s announcement, the code (which supports Linux and Mac OS X) has been downloaded over 300 times.

• SU² website
• Stanford’s Aerospace Design Lab

EnSight 10 to be Integrated Into FLOW-3D

Flow Science and CEI have partnered to integrate CEI’s EnSight 10 CFD postprocessing software into Flow Science’s FLOW-3D CFD solver. The combination will give FLOW-3D users a client-server architecture for use in postprocessing, all of EnSight’s advanced postprocessing capabilities, and Python-based customization.

A beta version of the integrated products is expected this fall with a production release next year. A “sneak peak” will be available at the FLOW-3D European Users Conference this summer.

• CEI’s announcement

Sunglass.io Promises to Democratize Design Computation

CAD model demo at Sunglass.io

Sunglass.io is a new startup that has created a web-based 3D application called Stage for sharing and collaborating on 3D models. In the future they plan to release something called Sim which will use their servers as the backend for heavier computations such as CFD. [At this time, Sunglass.io seems like something to keep an eye on.]

• Sunglass.io on SolidSmack
• Sunglass.io

GeekoCFD Bundles Open Source CFD Tools

GeekoCFD is a collection of CFD tools built on OpenSUSE 64-bit Linux provided with the intent of “easy and immediate” access to open-source CFD tools including gmsh, OpenFOAM, Paraview, Blender, and more.

• GeekoCFD

This, That, and The Other

• Enclosure heaters designed with CFD
• CFD modeling of the aortic valve
• Simulating a fire sprinkler with SolidWorks Flow Simulation
• CONVERGE CFD is mentioned in this issue of SAE’s Powertrain & Energy
• A video explanation of why air moving faster over a wing’s upper surface is not the source of lift
• Building better reactors with CFD from CD-adapco

“Why CAD Will Wither on Apple”

CAD expert Ralph Grabowski posted the article Why CAD Will Wither on Apple on the WorldCAD Access blog. In his post he says that Apple will never be well suited for CAD because Apple doesn’t doesn’t understand the special needs of that industry.

I tend to think of CAD and meshing software as being very similar. Certainly meshing software lacks the breadth of CAD’s design tools. But meshing software has to carry around the geometry and create a mesh on it too.  While the Mac hasn’t vaulted to the top of our supported platforms list (it’s third behind Windows and Linux) neither we nor our Mac customers have found anything that prevents it from being a suitable platform.

Ralph says that CAD apps need lots of RAM, a full OpenGL implementation, and intimate access to the graphics chip among other things.

What do you think about CAD, CFD or meshing software on Mac? If you’re curious, why not give Pointwise for Mac OS X a try?