The field of application is nearly unlimited, and the hybrid meshes generated are of high quality. The eFAME service benefits from AVL's FAME development work. Meshes, generated with the latest version, FAME Advanced Hybrid, are characterized by wall layers and a high portion of hexahedral elements. Tetrahedral and pyramidal elements are used in transition layers from coarse to fine (and vice versa).

The results are very efficient meshes with a comparable low number of elements - an important benefit for the solver calculation time, which directly corresponds to the number of elements. Mesh efficiency is further supported by the automatic feature size recognition capability, which identifies sharp edges and strong curvatures and automatically refines the mesh in those areas.

For more information about the eFAME service, visit http://meshing.avl.com.

The jet noise prediction tool, Jet3D, was run on a dual processor G5 in order to determine performance compared to the older Apple G4 and an Intel Pentium 4 system.

The Jet3D code is written in FORTRAN and C and has been written in both a double precision scalar and vector version. The vector version was optimized to run on the AltiVec instruction set on the G4 and G5 processors and will not run on the Pentium 4 machine.

It should be noted that the G4 and G5 systems had two processors while the P4 system had a single processor. Therefore, only single processor results are presented for the G4 and G5. Furthermore, it is also important to remember that the G5 is a 64bit architecture whereas the P4 is 32bit. This will have a significant impact on the performance of a double precision code such as Jet3D which is using 64bit words. Lastly, the G5 is at a disadvantage because optimized compilers for the new architecture are not yet available.

Results from running the scalar version of Jet3D show that the 2.0GHz G5 is equal in performance to the 2.66GHz P4 system at 255 MFLOPS (million floating point operations per second).

Results from running the vector version of Jet3D show that the G5 can produce an impressive 2755 MFLOPS performance on vector optimized code.

From these results, it would seem that the new offering from Apple can hold its own in computational intensive applications such as CFD.

The Wing-Tail Calculator was developed using a vortex lattice (vortex rings) CFD method. The program is quite powerful and yet easy-to-use.

Wing-Tail can be used to:

1. Compute lift-drag coefficients for an isolated wing
2. Compute lift-drag coefficients for a wing-tail system
3. Determine neutral points for wing-tail system
4. Compute trim angle
5. Compute the aerodynamic coefficients at the trim angle
6. Simulate ground effect

The FIPER project is a four-year $21.5 million project co-funded by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) as part of its Advanced Technology Program. FIPER establishes a “Federated Intelligent Product EnviRonment” that streamlines the design of engineered products, integrating legacy and best-of-breed analytical and design tools through a web-enabled environment.

Fluent and Engineous will initially team to gather requirements, develop, implement, and test components in conjunction with FIPER pilot projects being executed in real world customer environments. Several pilot projects and demonstrations are underway in major manufacturing organizations such as GE, Parker Hannifin, Goodrich, and Honeywell.

ANSYS, ICEM-CFD and CFX-related technical paper abstracts are being accepted until August 15, 2003. The technical paper portion of the conference provides users the opportunity to tell their story to colleagues and showcase their organization.

For more information visit the conference website.

This major release offers turnkey aerodynamic and aero acoustic simulations in and around moving objects as found in aerospace and automotive industry for the control of aerodynamically generated noise. The CAA software is a development by TNO in The Netherlands and will be presented at the TNO Booth during the Paris Airshow (20 - 25 June 2003).

The novel workflow manager of the SWIFT software integrates meshing, CFD simulations, CAA simulations and visualisation in a very user-friendly way. This saves significant processing time by preventing unnecessary data exchange and mesh generation cycles.