3D CAD NEWS

Researchers using high-performance computing (HPC) technology and computational fluid dynamics software (CFD) have gone after a truly noble pursuit. They are trying to understand how the stars of world football (AKA "soccer" for our American readers) can seem to make the ball "bend" or change in flight.

"Soccer Sim" is a project at the University of Sheffield (UK) Sports Engineering Research Group, with support from Fluent Europe (maker of CFD software). They have analyzed the physics of David Beckham's famous penalty kick goal against Greece in World Cup 2001, and found that the air turbulance around the ball changed from turbulant to laminar several yards from the goal, allowing the ball to change trajectory and shoot into the top corner of the goal.

A complete summary of the research is at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics website.

 

You know things have taken a truly pitiful turn for the worse when a software vendor is so desperate for good news it announces new features with such specific phrases as “customers will benefit from numerous enhancements.” That seems to be the story at MSC.Software, which has been on the ropes for some time. We know of at least one private equity fund that is taking a close look at what might be done with the carcass. But we digress.

In this week’s announcement of new features, there were 26 sentences in the body of the press release, not counting headlines and the boilerplate text attached to every press release. There were exactly five sentences that actually mentioned new features in MSC.Software products, and they are, well, not very specific. I think this is the point where Dave Berry would say, “I am not making this up.”

For those of you who still care, the five gems of information, in order, were:

• In the latest release of Adams, customers will benefit from numerous enhancements to the Adams Solver, Adams/Vibration, and Adams/Car.
• Some of the new capabilities in the latest release [of MSC Nastran] include advancements in the solver performance, NVH and acoustics, new capabilities for shape and topology optimization, and advanced heat transfer analysis with thermal contact, to name a few.
• Many enhancements have been included in this release [of Patran] including support for 64-bit hardware for working with very large models and new interface capabilities to improve the overall productivity of the analyst.
• This release of Marc includes many enhancements, including new optimization for handling large assemblies such as Powertrain systems, new capabilities in component failure and delamination, advances in structural and thermal modeling, and more.
• In this latest release of Dytran, new capabilities have been included to reduce solution time for many fluid-structural interaction problems.

If you use MSC.Software products, perhaps you can discern the true value of these upgrades by reading these statements. Looking at MSC.Software financial results of the last five quarters, I have to believe not many MSC.Software users are continuing to find such value.

Private equity firms are wondering what to do with the carcass of MSC.Software (above) if they buy it.

 

Doing some self-serving promotion for a conference this week, Fortune Magazine asked a variety of technology big-wigs "What technology has taken the most unexpected turn in your lifetime?" They polled the usual big-shots and pundits, but also some people in the trenches doing cool stuff including Aptera Motors CEO Steve Fambro. Scroll down to look at the "car" Aptera is working on and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, Fambro gave what I thought was a really smart answer. He pointed to the ability to use PC's as a "force multiplier" in engineering. Here's only a bit of what he had to say:

Properly used, and I stress "properly," computers are ... powerful "force multipliers." For example, at our company we're heavily leveraged in CFD, computational fluid dynamics. Every single part of our vehicle that touches the air has been through countless revisions to lower the drag. Fifteen years ago, even ten years ago, our only alternative would have been to use a wind tunnel, an expensive and lengthy affair. ... A small company, armed with these tools, but without a bureaucracy, can turn around key engineering decisions in days or hours, not months or years. The proliferation of these tools is a great equalizer with the bigger companies.

You can read the entire quote from Fambro, as well as interesting comments from Esther Dyson, Bill Joy, Jonathan Schwartz, and others, in the Fortune Magazine Online article, "What Technology Has Surprised the Most?"


The Aptera typ-1, not to be confused with your Uncle Buck's Buick Riviera.

Our name is 3D CAD News, but 3D CAD is about more than creating geometry. So we stick our nose into many interesting areas, following the model.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is becoming more and more intertwined with the engineering/design process. As firms learn to work in a dynamic, concurrent fashion, analysis and design become closer--and more valuable.

Thus the news note from a Formula 1 (motor sport) news site caught our attention this morning. Advantage Honda, a CFD consulting service for F1 racing teams, is ending all out-of-house consultancies. It will be working strictly to improve performance for Honda's two F1 teams. As F1 fans can tell you, this year Honda needs all the help it can get.

If the F1 teams do poorly, there's always Cart racing. (Photo courtesy Advantage Honda)

Flomerics says today it will provide its engineering fluid dynamics (EFD) simulation software to universities and colleges around the world for teaching and research purposes.

Flomerics EFD products are gaining popularity because, unlike traditional computation fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation software, EFD operates inside mechanical CAD software, working directly with the CAD data. "This unique feature allows users to skip the most time-consuming aspects of using CFD software," said John Parry, research manager at Flomerics. "The user doesn't need to learn a new interface, there is no CAD export and meshing is fully automated, so students can focus solely on learning about fluid dynamics instead of how to use software."

Products available for engineering purposes:

• •EFD.Pro - EFD fully embedded within the Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire environment
• •EFD.V5 - EFD fully embedded CFD solution within the CATIA V5 environment
• EFD.Lab - a general purpose CAD-embedded fluid flow and heat transfer software

EFD has sophisticated physical models to simulate a wide range of engineering tasks -- from creeping non-Newtonian flows to supersonic gas flows with high mach numbers. EFD is also provided with a number of detailed ready-built and documented validation cases that can be used as course material. The version of the software available to education has the same capabilities as the commercial version, with no restrictions on physical modeling or meshing.

COSMOSFloWorks is a SolidWorks product developed by Flomerics that uses the same underlying technology, so educational users of SolidWorks may already have COSMOSFloWorks.

EFD is available for immediate shipment to educational and research institutions. Interested readers may download their choice of free EFD online demos at http://www.nika.biz

Engineering students at Looking-Glass University discuss
modifications to their gas flow analysis of a new design for a hookah.