Since our inaugural newsletter (March 2007) we have been busy expanding the content on our website. If you haven't visited us in a while, now is a good time to catch up. We've posted informative, even funny (we hope!) blog stories. We've expanded our examples of Caedium and its add-ons in action. In our articles section we have defined terms that you'll see used throughout the website.

For your convenience, here are the latest content additions since our last newsletter.

Blog

Introduction to Aerodynamics
Merriam-Webster's online dictionary definition for aerodynamics is "a branch of dynamics that deals with the motion of air and other gaseous fluids and with the forces acting on bodies in motion relative to such fluids." So what is aerodynamics again?
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April Fools - Fake Wired Cover
April 1st is April Fools' Day and so I thought it was an opportune moment to try my limited Gimp skills to fake a Wired cover. Maybe one day Caedium will be featured on the cover of Wired – I have a design ready!
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Caedium on Cover of Wired Magazine
An image created by Caedium with our Professional add-on and rendered in POV-Ray will adorn the April 1st, 2007 special edition cover of Wired magazine. The magazine will also feature articles taken from our blog.
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Why Use a Panel Method?
Panel methods can calculate the gas or liquid flow around complex 3D configurations, such as aircraft, with relative ease. However, that ease comes at a price: panel methods are incapable of modeling the viscous effects that are evident in all real-world flows. So why would an engineer use a panel method?
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Navier-Stokes Equations
Readers of Physics World, published by the Institute of Physics, voted Maxwell's equations and Euler's identity the greatest equations of all time. I guarantee if you posed the same question to mechanical engineers the Navier-Stokes equations would figure near the top, probably second to Newton's F = ma.
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Competition Spurs Innovation
Competition spurs innovation like nothing else. It appears that a new golden age of engineering and science competition is upon us, with substantial monetary prizes going to the victors.
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Formula 1 Aerodynamics
One of the most dramatic examples of an aerodynamic device is a Formula 1 racing car. It wasn't always so, in fact pre-1967 F1 cars made very little use of aerodynamics. The thinking at that time was to optimize cars for straight-line speed, i.e., minimize drag.
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Examples

DLR F4 Wing-Body Calculation
The DLR F4 is an idealized wing-body model of a passenger jetliner, such as the Boeing 737, that was tested in multiple wind tunnels for comparison with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculations.
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NLR 7301 Multi-Element Airfoil Calculation
Multi-element airfoils are common sights on open-wheel racing cars and aircraft during take-off and landing.
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Articles

Mach Number
The dimensionless Mach number is a means to represent the speed of an object through a fluid (or the speed of a fluid over an object) relative to the speed of sound in the fluid.
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Reynolds Number
Dimensionless lift coefficient and drag coefficient values permit comparisons between similar shapes moving through a fluid. Such comparisons are only valid if the Reynolds numbers are also equivalent.
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Pressure Coefficient
The pressure coefficient is a dimensionless quantity of interest to aerodynamicists.
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Lift Force and Drag Force
Airplanes defy gravity. Formula 1 racing cars corner at incredible speeds generating lateral forces up to 4.5 times that of gravity. Yachts can circumnavigate the globe by wind power alone. These incredible feats are all due to the lift force generated by airfoils moving through air. Of course nothing comes for free; for lift, the cost is drag.
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Meshing
Most Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) analysis techniques, such as our Panel Flow add-on, require that the geometry be broken up into a mesh or grid to perform a calculation.
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