Winter Solstice 2018
Happy Winter Solstice 2018! Today’s post is something a little light hearted as it’s the shortest day of the year in the southern hemisphere: it’s a sperm whale (Physeter microcephalus) headfirst at Mach 2.0.
Peter Brady was (re)watching the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy movie last night and was inspired by the scene above Magrathea where a pair of nuclear missiles are turned into a bowl of petunias and a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), respectively. If you’re not familiar with this here is an extract from the movie:
Or better yet, buy all the books and then read them - we don't get a cut but you'll probably enjoy them 😉.
For this work he’s assumed that the whale is travelling head first rather than belly first as in the move. The grid is pretty rough and was generated using the CFD-VisCART adaptive cartesian mesher – you can see the refinement boundaries. CFD-FASTRAN was used as the density based solver for the supersonic flow field.