This Week in CFD

Stanford Updates SU²

The Aerospace Design Lab at Stanford University last week announced a new release of their open source CFD code, SU². This new version, called “Eagle” or v3.0, is focused on detailed RANS validation and accuracy improvements.

In addition, they have released SU² Educational v1.0, a simplified version of the code targeted toward students who want to learn compressible CFD from a well-organized code and toward those users who want accurate 2D solutions. A typical target application is airfoil analysis.

More information about SU² can be found at su2.stanford.edu.

This SU2 simulation of the DLR-F6 geometry from the 3rd Drag Prediction Workshop demonstrates the improved accuracy. Image provided by Stanford.

Things to Read & A Job

• “Social media is a hot topic these days, even among engineers.” [That's kinda like saying "Hmm, this email thing seems to be catching on." Plus, I'm not confident of exactly how enthusiastically engineers have embraced social media. Regardless,] Machine Design published a great resource, The Best of the Web for Engineers, that lists blogs, tweeters, websites, groups and forums that run the gamut from engineering ethics to mechanical design. [And the answer is no. I checked.]
• will.i.am is now 3D Systems’ chief creative officer. [Does anyone think this stunt has any redeeming qualities?]
• Meshing guru Jonathan Shewchuk shares tips on Giving an Academic Talk. [These tips apply beyond academia.]
• From LinkedIn we learn that MSC still has an opening for a Lead Software Engineer in mesh generation.
• Think of CFD as a way to find mistakes in a design before someone loses an eye.
• Desktop Engineering delves into the data monster that is simulation visualization.

The computation behind this flame trench simulation by NASA took a week on a 960 core supercomputer. Image from the NAS flickr page. Click image for video.

Meshing

• In Part 1 of a series on Accuracy and Checking in FEA, we learn important things about the mesh.
  • Don’t rely on your eyeball to assess mesh quality. Use your software’s built-in mesh checking tool.
  • Be aware that how your mesher computes quality metrics may differ from how your solver computes the same metrics.
  • The specific mesh quality metrics on which you rely vary depending on your application and your solver.
  • Gaps (usually the result of gaps in the underlying geometry model), normal vector alignment, and boundary condition application should all be thoroughly checked before beginning your analysis.
• Meshing researcher Daniel Zaide adapted his edge insertion technique to reproduce paintings in mesh form. On his webpage there’s a video (currently offline but soon to be fixed) and a GIF illustrating the meshing of Paul Klee’s 1914.

Events

• The 16th International Conference on Geometry and Graphics will be held 4-8 August in Innsbruck, Austria. This event is sponsored by the International Society for Geometry and Graphics (isgg.net), not to be confused with the International Society for Grid Generation (isgg.org), whose website doesn’t work anyway.
• Eindhoven University of Technology is offering a 6 week course on Sports and Building Aerodynamics.
• Taxal founder, Allan Behrens, will give a keynote presentation at this year’s Collaboration and Interoperability Congress.

CFD simulation of Monash University’s Formula SAE car in a turn with turbulent kinetic energy shown. Image from the Leap CFD blog. Click image for full article.

Software

• DHCAE Tools announced an update to CastNet, a GUI environment for OpenFOAM.
• Symscape announced the release of ofgpu v1.1, a GPU linear solver library for OpenFOAM.
• A new version of OpenHyperFlow2D is available.
• Improve performance by a factor of 5-8 with the new FieldView parallel export in ANSYS Fluent 15.

Wow. So color. Much motion. Amaze.

As the tweet said, don’t blame me if you spend all afternoon playing with AeroDoodle, CFD in your browser, from Swansea University. [And yes, the first thing I did was doodle "my" initials.]

AeroDoodle – click to go to the site