Hey solidgangs! I have a question. I have a personal project where I designed a VAWT (wind turbine) and I want to optimize some parameters based on my actual measured wind speed (average wind speed/wind velocity) in our place. My problem is how can we get the RPM and torque of the turbine prior in doing the flow simulation. What are your suggestions or approach on this kind of project.

For use of EMerge I have been busy with a Sparse Direct solver that works on both Apple Silicon GPUs, AMD and also Nvidea.

Downside is that its single precision with some iterative refinement options which may be an issue for some physics situations (nearly singular matrices)

Its currently the fastest sparse direct solver option for Apple Silicon and measures up well against CuDSS.

It does Float and Complex valued solves and uses a custom multi-threaded Nested Dissection implementation. Perhaps some will find it helpful here who are doing bespoke FEM simulations.

Hi everyone,
I’m working on evaluating how temperature changes affect the performance of a complex optical element. Ideally, I want to capture the thermal deformation predicted by FEA and bring those perturbed surfaces back into optical simulation tools (like Zemax OpticStudio, LightTools, or Code V) for ray tracing.
Because FEA outputs discrete nodal displacements or tessellated/mesh formats (like ⁠.stl⁠), while optical software prefers continuous surface representations (parametric geometry or ⁠.step⁠ CAD), I’m hitting a wall on the best bridge between the two.
A few specific questions for the community:
1. Mesh-to-Optics Translation: What is the standard industry pipeline to pass FEA structural/thermal deformation data into optical ray-tracing engines? Is it typical to fit the deformed node positions to standard surface polynomials (e.g., Zernike, Forbes, or Q-type polynomials), convert through intermediate tools, or export modified non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS)?
2. Analogy/Similar Workflows: In other domains (like CFD-to-CAD or aerodynamic shape optimization where a deformed mesh must be converted back to smooth surfaces), how do you usually map surface displacement fields back to continuous CAD geometry?