June 2009

Another busy month here at Symscape - is there any other kind? The highlight was the first public demonstration of the next version of Caedium incorporating our new RANS Flow add-on at the Fourth OpenFOAM Workshop. Since our last newsletter we've also added a new article, a new tip and a new blog post to our website. Keep reading for the low down on all the action.

Cyclone StreamlinesCyclone Flow Simulation: Solving the RANS equations

Fourth OpenFOAM Workshop

The Fourth OpenFOAM Workshop in Montreal, Canada on June 2-4, 2009 was a great opportunity to see the latest developments from the OpenFOAM community. For those not familiar with OpenFOAM, it is an open source toolkit supporting computational continuum mechanics applications, with a focus on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). It is also the basis for our new Caedium RANS Flow add-on. OpenFOAM is particularly popular amongst university researchers who produce custom applications for complex physical processes such as in-cylinder flows with moving valves and pistons. Increasingly industrial CFD users are also looking to OpenFOAM due to its customization options and affordable, high-performance parallel capabilities as an alternative to closed source commercial CFD solvers.

The workshop also provided a venue for the first public demonstration of Caedium and the RANS Flow add-on, which was well received. The need for a GUI-driven pre/post processor (available on Windows as well as Linux) was an oft-cited requirement at the workshop if OpenFOAM is to expand its appeal beyond its current hardcore CFD users. So the timely arrival of Caedium with its RANS Flow add-on generated a lot of excitement.

Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes Equations

The Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations lie at the heart of most practical CFD approaches. In preparation for the release of our Caedium RANS Flow add-on, read more at "Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes Equations."

Color Map

In Caedium you can drag and drop a scalar or vector field (e.g., Velocity) from the Results Tool Palette onto geometry entities to visualize the field using a color map (also known as contours on a face or iso-surfaces in a volume). Read more in our "Color Map" tip.

Science Museum: Computing

While on a recent visit to London I spent an enjoyable afternoon at the Science Museum. What I found was more sustenance for my computing-fluids obsession. In fact I came across enough fascinating exhibits to fill several blog posts. I'll kick off with a computing-themed post, first covering computing prehistory starting with the Babbage Difference Engines and the Phillips Hydraulic Computer, and moving on to the dawn of supercomputing with the Cray-1. Read more of my latest blog post at "Science Museum: Computing."