Blog

The NAFEMS blog features industry news, a raft of technical topics, thought leadership, and all the latest from the analysis community.

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Boyhood

by The CAE Guy Usually, when a movie is trying to convey the passage of time, say by a flashback to a character’s childhood, a young actor is used that someone, perhaps the casting director, has determined bears some resemblance to the adult actor. “Boyhood” is the story of growing up as seen through the eyes of a child and breaks that mold by shooting over a 12 year period with the same cast.

CAE Guy

09 October 2014

The CFD interview

by The CAE Guy Now that I have a few months to further settle in to the aero-thermal department manager role, I have had the chance to think more about expanding the role of Computational Fluid Dynamics within the department and potentially within the rest of the company as well. Our department certainly has an overall CFD strategy, but how that CFD strategy relates to the testing strategy

CAE Guy

05 May 2015

From Wind Tunnels to High Performance Computing

by The CAE Guy Back in the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was created by congressional charter in May 1933 as a federally owned corporation in the United States and ultimately declared constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1936 [1, 2].The TVA was, in part, established as a way to combat the seeming unfair business practices of for-profit power generation that that favored

CAE Guy

19 April 2016

Wind tunnels winding test engineers up

by The CAE Guy I confess to be continually surprised at the lack of understanding of Computational Fluid Dynamics by some (repeat, some) test engineers and managers. Not that they are not good at their jobs, but it comes up often enough that I have had to issue and edict that background information must be included with CFD results reports. The test equivalent of this is to include the specs of

CAE Guy

11 January 2016

Hendrix, Van Halen, Newton and Einstein

by The CAE Guy Back in the 1980s, when I was 16 or 17, I was arguing/discussing the “best” rock and roll guitarist off all time with a high school classmate of mine. While I remember it was a heated “debate” where we agreed to disagree: Long story short [1], I was advocating for Eddie Van Halen and he was advocating for Jimi Hendrix. For a little background, my classmate was a guy that seemed,

CAE Guy

28 October 2015

I want (CAE) candy!

by The CAE Guy Springtime is in the air here in the Midwestern US, which means there is a transfer happening from indoor to outdoor activities. For me, that means the end of coaching volleyball to attempting to find time to ride my bicycle more (one of my New Year’s resolutions …), and playing pickup Ultimate[1]. Since I managed to not finish all (or, technically, any…) of the woodworking/home

CAE Guy

22 July 2015

Big Time Manager

by The CAE Guy This is now what our two teenage daughters call me occasionally.Mostly in the context of when they think I am trying to get away with something. Such as: Oh, Dad thinks that since he’s a Big Time Manager now, he can do what he wants and not follow the rules. For teenagers, this happens relatively often as their “lens” on the world is decidedly different that most everyone else’s

CAE Guy

06 February 2015