The dual themes of this month's newsletter are updates and videos. You'll find updates from OpenFOAM®¹ 1.6.x to 1.7.x for both Caedium and our OpenFOAM for Windows source code patch. And you'll find videos related to Caedium on our new YouTube channel. Also I have a new blog post on something close to all of our hearts - CFD pricing.

Symscape YouTube Channel

OpenFOAM 1.7.x Upgrade for Caedium

The OpenFOAM solvers and utilities used by the latest release of Caedium (v2.3) RANS Flow and Professional add-ons have been upgraded to OpenFOAM 1.7.x from 1.6.x on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Also the unsteady incompressible flow solvers in Caedium now use the PIMPLE algorithm instead of the PISO algorithm. PIMPLE has better stability for large time steps compared to PISO. Read more...

OpenFOAM 1.7.x on Windows 64-bit with Native MPI

We have updated our Windows patch for the latest OpenFOAM release (v1.7.x). As with the previous patch version this also supports 64-bit compilation using the MinGW-w64 cross-compiler and parallel computation using the native Windows MPI implementation provided by the free Microsoft HPC SDK and also available on Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 for clusters. Read more...

YouTube Video Channel

Over at YouTube you'll find a new Symscape channel with videos related to Caedium. For starters I've posted two videos:

• A screencast of an entire Caedium CFD simulation
• An animation created in Caedium of a CFD simulation around an open wheel race car. This video is also a candidate (in need of your vote!) for Kenneth Wong's Virtual Desktop Analysis Story for October.

How Much Does CFD Software Cost?

It seems you can go online and find the price of almost anything these days. You want to know the price of a Mercedes, just visit their website and there it is. If you want to know the price of a Honda, same again - it's easy. However, if you want to know the price of commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software then you are out of luck. I guess it's a case of 'if you have to ask, you can't afford.' Symscape is one of the few exceptions - if you happen to stop by our Caedium product pages you'll see how much our CFD software costs - what an innovation, actually publishing CFD software prices! Read more...

Notes

1. OpenFOAM is a registered trademark of OpenCFD and is unaffiliated with Symscape.