What if a homemade air-filter could have a huge impact on your child’s school? We set out to discover if these easy to make Comparetto Cubes can actually decrease virus transmission rates. With kids going back to school and inconsistent ventilation solutions being presented across our children’s school system, we decided to dig in and find the most cost-effective safety precaution that could make a difference in preventing the spread of COVID-19 in classrooms. This is what we found. Check your brand preferences at the door. What particle sizes should we be capturing? Figure 1 If you have foll ..read more

A Guide to Estimating the Organizational Costs of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Simulations While the use case and needs analysis will provide the basis of a CFD acquisition strategy, there are several potential hardware, software, and manpower combinations that can meet any simulation requirement. Download our free eBook to learn more. REQUEST EBOOK: CFD COSTS Costs of CFD Name * First Name Last Name Email * Company * Thank you! You will receive a link to the eBook on CFD Costs soon. In the meantime, checkout our blog series on Comparing CFD Software. Subscribe Sign up with your email a ..read more

The meteoric rise of the Dyson brand has been nothing less than astonishing. Sure, it hasn’t hurt that his vacuums were sexy, but what really mattered was meeting an unmet customer need by repurposing a centuries old fluid dynamics design.  A pair of industrial cyclones It was 1978 and James Dyson was fed up with changing vacuum bags. While working at the Kirk-Dyson company, Sir James had the need to remove particulates from an air stream in his factory. He learned from colleagues of a device known as a cyclone separator which uses the centrifugal forces resulting from fluid vortice ..read more

This fluid dynamics related puzzle went viral on Facebook a few years back. I guess when Einstein taunts you it is pretty hard to resist giving it a go. Lets use this puzzle to describe the process we go through as computational fluid dynamicists when approaching a novel problem for the first time while also showing off a recently introduced capability in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ that is unlocking a new class of industrial problems to CFD analysis. Step 1:  Use engineering judgement to make the most reasonable assumptions where information is lacking. In this case, we must assume quite a lot ..read more

Every few months or so, some awesome flow visualization makes its way into mainstream culture. The latest is the “water flower.” The “water flower” is the result of a very large droplet, released by the popping of a water balloon, falling through a kitchen strainer. Visualizations such as these fall into the ASMR category for me. ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response and is most often triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli that cause a tingling sensation that usually beings at the top of your head and spreads down your body. As of late, ASMR is commonly used in the ti ..read more

One of my favorite Letterman bits of all time was “Will It Float?”. The premise was simple: an object would be described and Paul and Dave had to guess whether it would float. Dave believed that people could pretty reliably make the correct prediction based on intuition. Personally, I would have asked for the mass and volume of the object, but that’s probably why I’m not often invited to participate in fun games. As many of you know, an object sinks or floats based on the mass of the water it can displace, at least if we exclude other complicating factors such as absorption or capsizing. If an ..read more

On a recent trip to the Outer Banks, I watched as the kids defended their sandcastles from the rising tide and wondered at the physics that make such fun possible. Granular materials like sand are very interesting in that they don’t constitute a single phase of matter, but can act like a liquid, solid or gas depending upon the circumstance. Everyone is innately familiar with sand behaving as a fluids, as in an hourglass. Less familiar is their behavior as a structural solid after the addition of a little water. What is even more intriguing to me is the subsequent retransition to liquid behavio ..read more

On a recent trip to the Outer Banks, I watched as the kids defended their sandcastles from the rising tide and wondered at the physics that make such fun possible. Granular materials like sand are very interesting in that they don’t constitute a single phase of matter, but can act like a liquid, solid or gas depending upon the circumstance. Everyone is innately familiar with sand behaving as a fluids, as in an hourglass. Less familiar is their behavior as a structural solid after the addition of a little water. What is even more intriguing to me is the subsequent retransition to liquid behavio ..read more

This is Part 5 of 5 in our CFD Software Comparison Series. If you’d like to receive updates like this in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter here. The Resolved Analytics CFD Software Survey is a new research study focused on the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software market. The results are based on survey responses from 624 industrial CFD software users worldwide and provide insights into CFD software user perspectives, market trends, the user experience, how companies in various industries are utilizing CFD, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the most common platforms ..read more

Next: CFD Software User Survey Results (Coming Soon) Previous: Semi-Comprehensive CFD Software Packages This is Part 4 of 5 in our CFD Software Comparison Series. If you’d like to receive the rest of the updates in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter here. Our CFD User Survey is still live. If you are a CFD user or know someone who is, your input is valuable. The survey is a chance for engineers to gain a deeper understanding of how our professional community uses CFD. Comprehensive Multiphysics Simulation Packages ..read more