How do you design a racing yacht to take advantage of every puff of wind, even when another boat blocks the air current? How do you see inside an experimental fuel cell while it’s operating? How do you design ventilation fans to enable firefighter access and passenger exit in case of fire in a subway station? CFD. That’s how.

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The research could yield the most accurate description to date of the turbulent flow environment blood cells and platelets are exposed to as they pass through an implanted mechanical heart valve — information that researchers hope will lead to improvements in current mechanical valve testing and design procedures, and help reduce the potential for thromboembolic complications.

Backed by a four-year, $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the research is being spearheaded by Ajit Yoganathan, Regents’ professor in the Wallace H. Coulter School of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and an internationally renowned expert on artificial heart valves and cardiovascular fluid mechanics research; and Fotis Sotiropoulos, an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a leading expert in computational fluid mechanics.

The 16th AIAA Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference is being held in conjunction with the 33rd AIAA Fluid Dynamics Conference to enable close synergism and interaction between CFD and a broader range of fluid dynamics research. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the conference, and a special session commemorating the event has been organized. The program consists of 28 invited and contributed sessions. Emphasis is on advances in CFD methods for steady and time resolved flow, shape optimization, and LES.

The comprehensive, three-part series of courses will prepare you for a career in the rapidly expanding field of computational fluid dynamics and fluid turbulence. Completion of these three courses will give you the equivalent of one semester of undergraduate and two semesters of graduate work. The courses are supported extensively with textbooks, computer programs, and user manuals. You can use the computer programs to develop your own code, or you may modify the existing code for assigned applications. You will need access to a computer with a PC pentium processor, FORTRAN compiler, and graphics package for the software applications. A fundamental knowledge of computer programming and familiarity with a basic graphic package are required.

“Our company is in the midst of a sixth consecutive year of record-breaking growth and we don’t see it slowing down anytime soon,” says Ed Williams, president of Blue Ridge Numerics Inc. (BRNI). “The newest members of our team each share our mission for putting CFD up front in the design process and they have the experience to really help current and future customers realize the full potential of CFdesign.”

One major suite of new features is focused on minimizing the user's interaction with large and complex meshes. Specific tools include a CAD-style layer manager, pick masks, and grid groups. "As CFD has matured, so has the sophistication of our customers", said John Chawner, Pointwise's president. "They are applying CFD to ever larger and more complex geometries, and the tools in V15 will ensure that geometric complexity doesn't spill over to the meshing process itself."

A second suite of new features includes enhancements to Gridgen's hybrid meshing capabilities, specifically the extrusion of near-wall prism layers. Re-extrusion is a new tool for continuing the extrusion process for a mesh, including complete recall of all attributes and the ability to back-up the extrusion as well as continuing forward.