The Product Design and Development Engineering Awards program salutes the best and the brightest in the engineering field - design ideas that show the most innovation, creativity, and promise for improving our world. If you have developed a product, component, device, system, material, or software package that you believe significantly improves the world in which we live and work, we want to hear your story. The awards program is open to all engineers and engineering teams working in the United States.

This new release is based on five major pillars: adaptive meshing, non-conformal meshing, enhancements and extension of viscoelastic models, elasticity-based remeshing, and a new user-friendly environment.

Adaptive and non-conformal meshing help the user to build an accurate computer model of the equipment design to be simulated, particularly for complex, real-world models, such as dies for window profiles and rubber seals, and coextrusion or fiber spinning equipment.

The advanced viscoelastic modeling capability in POLYFLOW 3.9 widens the realm of possibility for modeling tricky viscoelastic flows. Elasticity-based remeshing capabilities provide further flexibility in the modeling of flows, which deform in three dimensions.

The new POLYMAN user environment is a Windows-like interface that consolidates all the tools in the POLYFLOW suite for easy access.

POLYFLOW 3.9 is available on UNIX and NT platforms.

A grid fin is a lifting and control surface that differs from a typical solid fin. The grid fin uses a honeycomb design that allows air to pass through the fin rather than bypass around it. One advantage of grid fins is the ability to maintain lift at higher angles of attack since grid fins do not have the same stall characteristics as planar fins. Another advantage is their very small hinge moment, which can reduce the size of control actuator systems. A third advantage is that their curvature has little effect on performance, so that folding the fins down onto the missile body is a storage design bonus.

The U.S. Army Research Lab’s viscous CFD analysis method has created a visual representation of airflow around the missile and through the fins. This method also provides numerical parameters such as axial forces and drag coefficients that are needed to accurately predict the trajectory. One challenge in developing a viscous CFD model for this purpose was creating an analysis mesh of the grid fin geometry.

The established approach would have been to change the design by either adding copper and steel or changing the ventilation method, build a new prototype and evaluate the temperature reduction achieved. This process required approximately ten iterations, each taking close to a month, in order to obtain an acceptable design. Because of the slow pace and high cost of this approach, Emerson decided to use CFD instead. Emerson engineers chose CFX-TASCflow from AEA Technology to create a virtual prototype based on the original design.

We look forward to seeing you there!"

We need this test data (ideally in some simple ASCII format) for academic research on connectivity compression for unstructured volume meshes. Thanks"