Engine cooling simulation has been done for several years with 1D tools being used to determine pressure losses and flow rates in cooling circuits. The more complex flow patterns in cylinder head and jacket are simulated with full 3D CFD to determine convective heat transfer coefficients.

BMW simulates the vehicle's coolant flow with FLOWMASTER2, which enables a one-dimensional description of the whole system. Flow in the engine coolant jacket, which is much less predictable, is described three-dimensionally by the CFD programme STAR-CD, from CD-adapco.

Highlights include:

• Improvements to the integration routines
• A mass option for particle path calculations
• Flow feature extraction
• New CFD functions
• Shadowgraphs and Schlieren plots

The new Feature Extraction dialog adds the capabilities of MIT's FX (Fluid Feature eXtraction) library. The FX library calculates and displays any of several features of 3-D flow solutions. It takes grid and boundary information, plus velocity and several scalar flow solution variables as input. It calculates a shock function to generate shock surfaces (iso-surfaces where the shock function equals unity), vortex cores, and separation/attachment lines.

The FIRE GL X1, scheduled to be available in October 2002, is the first in the world to deliver a fully programmable floating point architecture in OpenGL® 2.0 and Microsoft® DirectX® 9, with double the performance of any product currently on the market.

Features:

• eight 128-bit parallel rendering pipelines
• 256B DDR RAM
• AGP 8X
• SMARTSHADER™ with support for up to 16 textures per rendering pass with pixel shaders
• dual monitor support
• stereo graphics support

"The FIRE GL X1 represents a significant breakthrough in the workstation market," said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President, Marketing and General Manager, Desktop, ATI Technologies Inc. "Its revolutionary architecture and raw power will be the only choice for artists, developers and engineers who want to create and refine digital content at unprecedented levels of versatility and speed."

The new Autodesk Inventor Certified Application Program certifies products that have met standards set by Autodesk to ensure quality, robustness and the highest level of interoperability with Autodesk Inventor 3D mechanical design software.

CFdesign makes it possible for 3D product designs built in Autodesk Inventor software to be evaluated and optimized without any type of translation or conversion process. Changes made to geometry within Autodesk Inventor are automatically reflected in CFdesign, eliminating the time-consuming and confusing process of creating and managing multiple geometry models during a project lifecycle.

In other news, the company announced the opening of new US sales offices in St. Louis and Denver that will service the Midwest and Southwest and Rocky Mountain regions respectively.

6th Symposium on Overset Composite Grids & Solution Technology.

The bi-annual symposium will be held October 8-10, 2002, at the Ramada Plaza Beach Resort, Ft. Walton Beach, Florida USA. This international symposium provides an open communication forum for mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from academia, industry, and government. The symposium organization is quite informal, and the primary purpose is to present and discuss new, current, and work in progress of the participants. The specific goals of the symposium are the following:

1. Communicate current work, new research ideas, and work in progress
2. Exchange ideas involving overset grid methodologies
3. Develop interactions between interested researchers
4. Provide an opportunity for interaction between researchers, developers, and users.

Electronic information and registration is available at the Symposium web site: http://www.arl.hpc.mil/Overset2002

We ask that you register your intent to participate via the web site to help us plan for the symposium.

You can download a pdf file of the symposium announcement brochure from the web site.

Please forward this announcement to anyone who may be interested.

Among the seven problems is a call for the solution to the Navier-Stokes Equations. The challenge is to make substantial progress toward a mathematical theory which will unlock the secrets hidden in the Navier-Stokes equations.

In order to be awarded the prize, the solution must prove one of the four following statements:

1. Existence and smoothness of Navier–Stokes solutions on R³
2. Existence and smoothness of Navier–Stokes solutions in R³/Z³
3. Breakdown of Navier–Stokes solutions on R³
4. Breakdown of Navier–Stokes Solutions on R³/Z³

Since we don ’t even know whether these solutions exist our understanding is at a very primitive level. Standard methods from PDE appear inadequate to settle the problem. Instead we probably need some deep new ideas.