“The tremendous growth of CFdesign within mainstream engineering and product development organizations around the world necessitated the addition of a seasoned CAE marketing professional to help us build on this momentum, foster strategic partnerships, and lead key business development initiatives,” Ed Williams, Blue Ridge Numerics president and CEO says. “Jim will help us enormously in these efforts.”

The most significant new feature is the Glyph scripting language. Glyph is an advanced "high level" language which will provide users with the ability to generate CFD grids parametrically. Glyph also features a journaling capability which allows playback of an interactive Gridgen session.

"CAE analysts have been pushing for better integration of CFD into the design process for years", said John Chawner, Pointwise's president. "By working closely with customers very early in the development cycle we were able to develop Glyph with capabilities that meet their specific requirements for customization, automation, and interoperability."

Another feature added to Gridgen for V14 is the ability to import native CAD files from a number of popular CAD programs. The ability to skip neutral file formats, such as IGES, streamlines the CFD process for Gridgen users.

In addition, this version of Gridgen will allow users to treat faceted triangular surfaces as geometry for mesh generation. Gridgen supports faceted surfaces in STL, VRML and other popular formats.

STAR-CD offers two methods for the prediction of noise. The first is aimed at capturing broad-band turbulence-based shear noise. The turbulence fields from a steady-state Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) simulation are post-processed to predict the shear-noise distribution in the flow field. This is a new feature in the STAR-CD software.

A second method, used for predicting coherent noise, utilizes the transient flow solver to predict the combined convection and pressure wave effects acting on surfaces. The standard RANS turbulence model and transient flow solver have long been a part of the STAR-CD package.

These two methods allow the CFD engineer to predict both resonant and broad-band based noise in the flow field.

The ATV is used for delivering equipment and consumables to the ISS and for orbital re-boosting when the ISS has lost altitude due to atmospheric friction. The Integrated Cargo Carrier (ICC) module, located at the front of the ATV, carries dry cargo which is placed in up to 8 racks mounted in the cylindrical portion of the ICC.

The ICC does not have an advanced enviromental control system, but does have a cabin fan designed to guarantee good ventilation and to ensure an adequate air distribution for crew comfort. Another primary goal of the fan is to avoid any stagnant flow regions in which toxic gases could accumulate and pose a suffocation threat to the astronauts. In addition, the air speed should be always lower than 0.25 m/s in the crew cabin, whereas the air temperature should be less than 28°C, but more than the minimum dew temperature of 16°C. Also, the 'touch temperatures' of surfaces exposed to the crew should not exceed 45°C.

Rather than build an expensive experimental apparatus to test the flow field in the ICC, ESA turned to CFDRC for CFD software which could be used to predict the flow field within the ICC.

During the initial stage of the investigation, researchers sought to determine the steady-state lift and drag coefficients for the hand and arm. The model for these simulations used k-epsilon turbulence modeling with non-equilibrium wall functions. Adaptive meshing was utilized to increase solution accuracy.

As defending champions, having won the America's Cup in 1995 and 2000, Team New Zealand hopes that CFX CFD software will enable them to achieve a third consecutive win - ensuring the team a place in the record books.