The ease of Cartesian or wrapper-based meshing for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), including immersed boundary methods, is predicated on having a suitable surface mesh (e.g., STL) as an input. That surface mesh has certain constraints that, if not satisfied, will either cause a poor final mesh or can cause the Cartesian meshing process to fail.

CFD Cartesian MeshSource: Richard Smith EngD Thesis 1996

The next release of the Caedium CFD software system on Windows will support the 3Dconnexion family of 3D mice.

3Dconnexion 3D Mice Ready to Control CaediumImage courtesy of 3Dconnexion

The next release of the Caedium CFD software system will include an enhanced Accuracy tool with a new maximum mesh size parameter. The new size parameter will provide a method to set an explicit physical element size for an entity (e.g., face) rather than just an interval (resolution) number as in the current version of Caedium.

Enhanced Caedium Accuracy ToolInterval-Based (left) vs Size-Based (right) Mesh Parameters

For the GPU Technology Conference 2013 (GTC13) I performed a series of simulations in Caedium comparing the OpenFOAM® linear solver GPU option using ofgpu with the standard CPU shared memory option using MPI. See selected slides and the presentation deck below.

The next release of the Caedium CFD software system will have a new combined menu and toolbar often referred to as a ribbon.

Caedium Ribbon on Windows

The next release of the Caedium CFD software system will provide an option to automatically convert a RANS Flow volume mesh to a polyhedral mesh - also known as a dual mesh. Solving the RANS equations on the dual mesh compared to the equivalent tetrahedral mesh typically leads to higher accuracy results with both faster and more reliable convergence.

Polygon Surface Mesh

See if you can spot the Caedium CFD simulation in this video (hint: 3:01) from SC12 featuring an interview by InsideHPC with Asetek CEO André Eriksen.

SC12 - the meet-up for all things supercomputing is now over. Our Microsoft collaborator, Wen-ming Ye, was at SC12, and while he was on the show floor he snapped some pictures of the Asetek liquid-cooling cluster running Caedium CFD simulations. So for anyone who missed the show, enjoy the pictures below thanks to Wen-ming.

Asetek Cluster Running Caedium CFD SimulationsWindows HPC Server 2008, HPC cluster manager heat map for 86 Caedium instances

More F1 in Schools news - Rapid Motion, a joint team from Australia and Germany, finished 4th overall at the 2012 F1 in Schools World Finals held in Abu Dhabi. Using Caedium Professional CFD simulations the team analyzed the aerodynamics of various designs resulting in a 16% improvement in average speed over their baseline car.

Rapid Motion Report on Final Design Iteration

Congratulations go out to F1 in Schools team Revved Up who have qualified for the Australian F1 in Schools National Finals, after a convincing win at their state competition. Revved Up used Caedium Professional CFD simulations to help optimize the aerodynamics of their car and to good effect by all accounts!

F1 in Schools Team: Revved Up