First Icepak Users' Group Meeting Announced

Palo Alto, California, will be the location of the first Users' Group Meeting devoted entirely to Icepak and electronics applications. The meeting will be held on February 5, 1999 at the Sheraton Palo Alto. The agenda will include user presentations and forums, a keynote address by the legendary Dr. Allan Kraus, a Fluent presentation by Dr. Bart Patel, and product updates by the Icepak development staff. On the day before the meeting, there will be workshops on thermal management for electronics led by Dr. Vivek Mansingh of Applied Thermal Technologies and Professor Avi Bar Cohen of the University of Minnesota.

Morgantown Office Opening

As of November 6, Fluent's newest US office location in Morgantown, West Virginia, is officially open for business. Located directly across the street from the US Department of Energy's Federal Energy Technology Center (FETC) headquarters, this new office puts specialized members of our consulting group near to FETC, EG&G, and other clients in the energy, power, environmental, and biomedical industries. The grand opening celebration took place on Friday, November 6. It included remarks by Rita A. Bajura, Director of FETC, Randy Wotring, President and General Manager of EG&G Services, and Ferit Boysan, Chief Operating Officer of Fluent.

Detroit Area Office Grows

Initiated in January 1998 to serve Fluent's rapidly growing customer base in the automotive industry, our Detroit area office has seen significant growth over the year. Currently staffed with 6 people, the office now offers a full range of services to our automotive clients, including technical support, consulting, and training, and is slated for more growth in 1999. The local presence has meant faster and more effective support for clients, who benefit from more direct interaction and on-site trouble-shooting of proprietary models.

Putting a CFD Spin on Soccer

During the recent Soccer World Cup in France, Fluent's CFD software gained prominence in The Telegraph, a leading UK newspaper, with an article in the Science section on "Secrets of Soccer's Spin Doctors". Fluent's Dr Keith Hanna, who has been working on predicting the trajectory of spinning soccer balls during dead-ball free kicks, was quoted in the article. Several CFD images were shown. The simulations examined a soccer ball geometry exposed to airflow forces (see inset). Individual quasi-steady analyses were coupled to a trajectory prediction with several degrees of freedom, in order to show how a real freekick scenario might be modeled. Dr. Hanna notes, "This study was prompted by the famous freekick by Roberto Carlos of Brazil in 1997, when the ball's trajectory amazed the soccer world. I decided to see if CFD could be used to predict this."

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