Air Flow Consulting published a paper at the Industrial Ventilation Conference 2003 (Winning the Award for Best Paper) on the subject of industrial ventilation titled "Virtual Prototyping and Virtual Reality in the Design Process of Industrial Ventilation". The paper [pdf] gives an introduction to virtual prototyping and the related topic of Virtual Reality. Finally, a case study shows how the virtual prototyping approach is used in the industrial ventilation design process. A mixing device in a chemical production plant was successfully retrofitted by local exhaust hoods. The aerodynamic concept was optimized using CFD.

Bill Readdy, NASA's associate administrator for spaceflight, said recertifying the external tank was at the root of a decision Thursday by senior managers to delay the first post-Columbia mission from September to March 2005.

"Return to flight has always been driven by fixing the tank because the tank was clearly the cause of the (Columbia) accident," Readdy told reporters. "An awful lot of what has been going on has been analysis of debris transport, how things that come off the tank (and are) transported from some area of the tank and then impinge on some other portion of the space shuttle stack.

When it was conceived in 1999, Icepro was a handy model clean-up tool exclusively for Pro/ENGINEER® users. The new version of Icepro has the same name, but is decidedly different. Icepro 4.0, built on Parametric Technology Corporation’s GRANITE™ technology, is CAD-platform independent. This capability allows industry-standard files such as STEP, IGES, or SAT to be imported with the same efficiency as native Pro/ENGINEER files. Furthermore, Icepro 4.0 is now a stand-alone software module, eliminating the requirement to execute it from within Pro/ENGINEER.

The AMD Opteron processors HE (55 watt) and EE (30 watt) for servers and workstations, which are expected to be available in March, bring world-class 32-bit performance and easy migration to 64-bit computing to customers who demand increased compute density, investment protection for the future and the most performance per watt of any processor in their class as measured by the industry-standard benchmark suite SPEC cpu2000.

The design specification was driven by the need to provide a super compact pump size to radically reduce the machine weight for a marine application as well as to reduce the construction costs of a large pump station.

Using TURBOdesign-1 to quickly assess different numbers of blades and design conditions, the flow conditions were optimized for the application. The blade surface pressure distribution of the impeller was optimized to achieve high suction performance, and the secondary flows and flow separation were controlled for the diffuser blades to ensure high efficiency for the heavily loaded diffuser.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today previewed the Solaris 10 Operating System, the upcoming version of its award-winning OS for systems based on UltraSPARC and x86 microprocessors. The new release, with early access versions available for download this summer, is the result of 20 years of research and development and will propel Sun's customers and partners over the next decade.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today delivered on its promise of extreme performance at compelling price points with the new Sun Fire V20z server featuring the screaming performance of the AMD Opteron processors and all the benefits of the Sun Java Enterprise System running on either the Solaris(tm) Operating System or Linux. Sun also announced new innovations to the Sun Fire B1600 blade platform, including the new Sun Fire B200x dual processor x86 blade and the newest edition of Sun's N1 Grid Provisioning Server, which allows customers to seamlessly mix, match and manage x86 and UltraSPARC blades running either the Solaris Operating System or Linux as one pool of resources.