At a recent FLUENT Users' Group Meeting, Dr. David Kohlman presented a short course on aircraft icing. The course covered the environmental conditions responsible for icing and a number of deicing and anti-icing systems in use.

Traditionally, aircraft icing was studied by performing experiments in an icing wind tunnel or by flying an aircraft in the wake of a tanker aircraft spraying water droplets. These methods are expensive and time consuming which lead researchers to computational modeling.

But has the GUI been an overall "win" for the CFD industry? Certainly the GUI has lowered the intellectual barrier required to start using CFD and that has opened CFD analysis to more markets -- markets which can't afford to support an in-house CFD expert. By pressing just a few buttons, a novice user can now generate a complete CFD solution without knowing any of the myriad details which lie below the surface. Questions of appropriate boundary conditions, turbulence closure, etc. never arise because all is hidden behind the powerful user interface.

Is using a GUI too easy? One argument is that the GUI, because of its high accessability, promotes uncritical use of CFD modeling. If we don't understand what the GUI is doing, then how can we ever hope to command it successfully? It is at this point that the GUI becomes a hinderance to the CFD process. The user errors it helps correct (the improper location of a boundary condition, for example), only serve to perfect an incorrect model.

Summary information on events, dates and times are directly below. Further details on e-vent content and on-line registration can be found at the e-vent website. Space is limited to 10 "seats" at each of the web events and sorry these events are ONLY AVAILABLE in North America.

The new GPUs deliver powerful enhancements including:

• up to 4 times the performance over previous GeForce generations
• innovative anti-aliasing technology
• nView(TM) multi-display technology

While NVIDIA has focused on the video game market, their products have always performed well for OpenGL-based MCAD operations. The new cards should be strong performers for pre- and post-processing CFD tasks.

CFX-ProMixus provides detailed analysis of mixing vessel processes through an embedded and fully automated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver. Using an intuitive interface, the user specifies reactor configurations from an extendable library of tank, baffle and impeller templates. CFX-ProMixus then automatically performs a CFD simulation of the flow within that vessel. The output is presented as a gallery of images and tables that permits pre-selection of component designs and reduces the number of iterations needed to develop optimum mixing performance.

CFX-ProMixus 2.1 adds many new impeller libraries, including new generic impellers (flat blade, pitched blade, retreat curve, curved blade and Smith turbine) and impellers from Philadelphia Mixers (high-solidity and low-shear hydrofoils), Chemineer, Cleveland Eastern Mixers and Lightnin (A310 and A320).

CFD 2002 is their 10th annual conference celebrating a decade of CFD excellence, is hosted by the University of Windsor and will be held at the Cleary International Centre in downtown Windsor.

The conference attracts academics, developers, and CFD users from industries such as Aerospace, Automotive, Chemical Process, Electronics, Energy, Manufacturing, and Power Generation. Anyone with an interest in exploring the latest advances in software and hardware is encouraged to attend.

Visit the CFD 2002 conference website at http://www.cfd2002.uwindsor.ca/eindex.htm for further information.