3-in Tack Strip Bracket TopOpt

I found a useful bracket on thingiverse for mounting things on a 3-in tack strip. Of course I thought this was a perfect opportunity for a bit of topology optimization. All of the design files and the stl (rendered above) are available on GitHub. The part is also on thingiverse.

Here's a video showing the progress of the optimization:


Rendered with a wave texture in Cycles to give the layered look it would have from an FDM machine, not quite right, but pretty close:

HiFiLES v0.1 Release

The folks at the Stanford Aerospace Computing Lab have recently released version 0.1 of HiFiLES. "HiFiLES is a high-order Flux Reconstruction solver for the Euler and Navier Stokes equations, capable of simulating high Reynolds number turbulent flows and transonic/supersonic regimes on unstructured grids."

From the release notes:

High-order numerical methods for flow simulations capture complex phenomena like vortices and separation regions using fewer degrees of freedom than their low-order counterparts. The High Fidelity (HiFi) provided by the schemes, combined with turbulence models for small scales and wall interactions, gives rise to a powerful Large Eddy Simulation (LES) software package. HiFiLES is an open-source, high-order, compressible flow solver for unstructured grids built from the ground up to take full advantage of parallel computing architectures. It is specially well-suited for Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) architectures. HiFiLES is written in C++. The code uses the MPI protocol to run on multiple processors, and CUDA to harness GPU performance.

The main reference for the code right now is this V&V paper.[1] The code uses an Energy Stable Flux Reconstruction (ESFR) scheme. Here are a couple papers on that approach.[2, 3].

References

[1]   López-Morales, M. R., Bull, J., Crabill, J., Economon, T. D., Manosalvas, D., Romero, J., Sheshadri, A., Watkins II, J. E., Williams, D., Palacios, F., et al., “Verification and Validation of HiFiLES: a High-Order LES unstructured solver on multi-GPU platforms,” .

[2]   Vincent, P. E., Castonguay, P., and Jameson, A., “A new class of high-order energy stable flux reconstruction schemes,” Journal of Scientific Computing, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2011, pp. 50–72.

[3]   Castonguay, P., Vincent, P. E., and Jameson, A., “A new class of high-order energy stable flux reconstruction schemes for triangular elements,” Journal of Scientific Computing, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2012, pp. 224–256.

Emerging and Readily Available Technologies and National Security

Here's the description of this report from the NAP site:

Emerging and Readily Available Technologies and National Security is a study on the ethical, legal, and societal issues relating to the research on, development of, and use of rapidly changing technologies with low barriers of entry that have potential military application, such as information technologies, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology. The report also considers the ethical issues associated with robotics and autonomous systems, prosthetics and human enhancement, and cyber weapons. These technologies are characterized by readily available knowledge access, technological advancements that can take place in months instead of years, the blurring of lines between basic research and applied research, and a high uncertainty about how the future trajectories of these technologies will evolve and what applications will be possible.