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2024

2024.12  Cart3D v1.6.0 Released: This release includes solver improvements in for the flow and adjoint solvers. Tool improvement allow more flexible manipulation of component-based geometry and tighter integration with external tools. These include better integration with NASA’s sBOOM atmospheric propagation code and it allows mesh adaptation and design to be driven using ground-noise outputs in sonic boom applications. Supported platforms include Linux (AMD and Intel) and MacOS (Apple Silicon). See the listing in the NASA Software Catalog for download.

2024.11  NASA SC|24 feature on Supercomputing in Supersonics:  The article "Supercomputing in Supersonics: Analyzing Noise Predictions from High-Speed Aircraft" focuses on the role of uncertainty quantification in Certification-by-Analysis for low-boom aircraft. Uncertainty in the boom carpet of NASA's Quesst (X-59) aircraft has been extensively studied using Cart3D.

2024.02  SpaceWorks releases Cart3D Plus: SpaceWorks Enterprises Inc. released their commercial product "Cart3D Plus" with support for HPC nodes and clusters. This product includes integration with their "Scorch" aeroheating code. SpaceWorks is an Atlanta, GA based company and releases Cart3D under license from the NASA Ames Technology Partnerships Office.

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2023

2023.04  NASA news feature: "Supercomputers Aid Quesst Researchers in Predicting X-59’s Sound", Cart3D simulations of the X-59 are highlighted in this outreach article written by John Gould that was featured on both the main NASA home page and that of the ARMD's Quesst mission.

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2022

2022.11 Cart3D v1.5.9 Released with a host of improvements and new tools. These include updates to the boundary conditions for modeling propulsion, target Mach number steering and new farfield objectives for adaptation and design when solving sonic boom problems. There are also a host of minor solver improvements for greater robustness, accuracy and speed. See the listing in the NASA Software Catalog for download.

2022.11 Cart3D IO libraries approved for release under NASA's Open Source license. The NASA chief council and Ames' Technology Partnerships division has approved release of the Cart3D IO libraries under version 1.3 of the NASA Open Source Agreement. These will be available for download from the NASA Software Catalog before the end of the calendar year.

2022.11 NASA SC|22 feature  on CFD tools for design of low-boom supersonic aircraft "Advancing NASA Software for Sonic Boom Prediction" featuring discussion of contributions made by Cart3D and other NASA CFD tools.

2022.08 NASA CAPE software released with Cart3D support. CAPE is a python-based run manager for Cart3D (pycart) and other CFD tools which can be used to create large aero databases. The aero database for the NASA's Artemis 1 mission used over 20,000 Cart3D simulations. Click here for general information on CAPE and see a simple Cart3D Tutorial here.

2022.03 NASA News item on "Ames' Contributions to the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology Aircraft" See the full article.

2022.01 Cover of Aviation Week: Wind tunnel tests and CFD simulations of the X-59 made the cover of Aviation Week and Space Technology January 24, 2022. The article "Wind-Tunnel Tests Validate Low-Boom X-59 Computational Fluid Dynamics" discusses the agreement between CFD predictions and the tunnel. A special feature within the article used numerous images from Cart3D simulations showing details of the flow and surface pressure contours. 

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2021

2021.12 Aerospace America's annual review issue had a great section on emerging  low boom technologies. The lead feature identified supersonic design methodologies developed using Cart3D as one of the most promising low-boom technologies of 2021.

2021.06 NAS Software Link. The NASA Advanced Supercomputing Center posted a general information link to Cart3D on the software tab of the NAS home page.  The info bar describes some recent in-house  work and documentation as well as information for getting Cart3D through NASA's software portal. see: https://www.nas.nasa.gov/software/cart3d.html

2021.04 NASA Feature "Saving the Earth from Asteroids". NASA published a feature article on planetary defense featuring many simulations done using Cart3D on the main NASA home page as part of an information campaign for Asteroid Day 2021.

2021.03 NASA supercomputing feature  on CFD tools for design of low-boom supersonic aircraft with a description of some of the key analyses done using Cart3D and other NASA CFD tools.

2021.02 NAS Researchers Bring Asteroid Simulation Down to Earth. NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division press release on asteroid threat assessment and the role of HPC simulation. This article includes a simulation of a ground-impacting asteroid done using Cart3D.
 

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2020

2020.12 Featured article on NASA Aeronautics home page. The X-59 is getting a lot of press these days, and some work done by the crew at Ames on the NAS supercomputers found its way to NASA's press department.

2020.11 NASA's show at SC|20 generated in a lot of interest this year due in large part to ARMD's upcoming X-59 low-boom flight demonstrator. Cart3D simulations have played a central role in the X-59's development. Read about it here.

2020.11 Cart3D Design Framework Update. Cart3D_Design_v0.9.8 was released to go with the Cart3D v1.5.7 update of Cart3D. This update to the design framework recognizes and supports multiple inlets/exists with all the power boundary options in Cart3D, it also has support for mass flow objective functions and constraints. see the announcement in the Cart3D discussion group.

2020.10 Released Cart3D v1.5.7 with a several significant improvements and new tools. These include updates to the boundary conditions for modeling propulsion, mass flow rate steering and  mass flow rate objectives for adaptation and design. Also included are new tools simplifying deflection of control surfaces and other geometric manipulations. There are also a host of minor solver improvements for greater robustness, accuracy and speed. See the listing in the NASA Software Catalog for download.

2020.09 Cart3D simulations were featured on NASA Aeronautics official Facebook page, get the full story at https://go.nasa.gov/2T3fghs.

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2019

2019.11 NASA's show at SC|19 featured a theater-style presentation describing Cart3D's role in design and analysis of the X-59 low-boom flight demonstrator. The NASA's advanced supercomputing division (NAS) ran a short feature on its official SC|19 website. There are also some really cool visualizations of the full 3-dimensional flow field around a prototype of the X-59 design and some other aircraft  using a newly developed computational schlieren visualization technique. 


2019.06 Inside HPC ran a story titled "Supercomputing Asteroid Impacts for Planetary Defenses" discussing Cart3D's role in predicting blast damage from the impact of large asteroids as part of NASA's Asteroid Threat Assessment Program. This discussion is related to work presented at SC|18 which is on-line here and also here. Earlier work on this topic had been discussed in articles in TechTimes here and elsewhere on the web.

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2018

2018.05 Released Cart3D v1.5.5 with a host of major upgrades. Chief among these are new, simpler boundary conditions for modeling propulsion, including mass flow rate steering and new mass flow rate objectives for adaptation and design. Lower dissipation in the solver, tighter error control with adaptation and much more.

2018.05 AIAA 2017-3255 named AIAA 2018 Applied Aerodynamics Best Paper from the 2017 AIAA AVIATION forum in Denver, Colorado. This paper discussed the application of Cart3D to various cases the second AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop which was held in January of 2017.

2018.01 Cart3D listed as "Featured Software" in NASA's 2017/2018 Software Catalog

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2017
 

2017.11 Aviation Week and Space Technology ran an article titled "NASA Supercomputers Unlock Flow Secrets" in their "This Week in Technology" that mentioned some of the asteroid work going on with Cart3D. See the article here (requires on-line access to Av.Week). If you don't have on-line access, you can still checkout the video that Av.Week posted on YouTube.

2017.11 One of the featured demo's at the NASA booth at SC|17 was a short presentation titled "Simulating Atmospheric Impacts: From Pebble-to Mountain-Size Meteoroids" which showed some of the ways Cart3D simulations are being used to model meteoroid entry. Here is a quick summary.

2017.07 "NASA Researchers Rock the World of Asteroid Simulation" Feature story on meteor simulation with Cart3D. The full article is here.  The full article as well as a shorter version was picked up by many news outlets, see it here.

2017.03 Cart3D used to predict the sonic boom resulting from the atmospheric entry of fist-sized meteoroids.
 
2017.01 NASA Spinoff article "Design Software Shapes Future Sonic Booms."

2017.01 Cart3D is #6 on NASA's list of "Top 20 Requested Software Titles" in the 2015/2016 Software Catalog

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2016

2016.09 NASA TVfeature "NASA Aerodynamics Simulations Reshape Flight for Fuel Efficiency"

2016.08 Feature story on multidisciplinary shape optimization including static aeroelastic effects using Cart3D headlines the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division's font page.

2016.08 Initiated alpha-test program for "c3d_Aeroblender" with Blender Plugins for Cart3D. These permit both I/O for Cart3D triangulations & basic parametric shape manipulation.

2016.07 Released Cart3D v1.5.1 with minor bug fixes and a short list of new features

2016.03 Hosted the Cart3D Advanced Design Workshop  at NASA Ames Research Center from 8-9 March covering advanced topics using design framework release v0.9.5 and Cart3D v1.5.

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2015

2015.09 Released  Cart3D Design Framework v0.95 for beta testing including native aerodynamic constraints, progressive optimization and multiple adjoints.

2015.09 Released Cart3D v1.5 with major upgrades including simulation of unsteady flow, automatic mesh growth for error-driven adaptation, equivalent area functionals, buoyancy driven atmospheric flows and more.

2015.03 Cart3D recognized in TechBriefs' list of  "Hot 100 technologies". Click here to read more!

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2014

2014.01 Participated in the 1st AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop. Click here for more.

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2013

2013.06 Released major upgrade to Cart3D v1.4.9,  with integrated adjoint-based mesh adaptation and error-estimation.

2013.06 Released update to Cart3D Design Framework for consistency with v1.4.9 release

2013.03 Updated beta release of Cart3D design framework Cart3D_Design (v0.9.1)

2013.01 Article in Spinoff 2012 see http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2012/ around page 115

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2012

AIAA-2011-3500 Awarded "Best Technical Paper" at the AIAA Applied Aerodynamics Conference (held in June 2011, Honolulu, HI). This paper discusses the use of Cart3D Adjoint-Based Design Framework for shaping supersonic aircraft with low sonic boom.

Release of Cart3D_v1.4.7 with integrated adjoint-based mesh adaptation and error-estimation

Close-Out Beta Testing of Cart3D_AERO (v0.95) module and slate for full-scale release

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2011

Cart3D Workshop: Getting Started with the Cart3D Adjoint-Based Design Framework.
Hosted at NASA Ames, 2-3 November 2011. This is a kick-off workshop for the Cart3D design framework

Open Beta Testing of Cart3D_AERO (v0.95) module for adjoint-based mesh adaptation and error-estimation

Release of Cart3D_v1.4.5

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2010

Desktop Aeronautics has acquired a license to sell Cart3D for commercial use through the NASA Ames Technology Partnerships Division. Here is a link to their Cart3D product page.

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2009

Cooperative agreement with Optimal Solutions Software LLC who's Sculptor software product now supports native Cart3D Geometry. See a video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUlFmq0xIK4&feature=related

Workshop II: Getting Started with Adjoint-Based Mesh Adaptation and Error Estimation in Cart3D. Hosted at NASA Ames, Feb, 2009. This is a kick-off workshop for phase II of the beta program for the Cart3D Adjoint-module.

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2008

Workshop I: Getting Started with Adjoint-Based Mesh Adaptation and Error Estimation in Cart3D Hosted at NASA Ames, Dec. 18. This was a government-only workshop for the phase I  beta release of the Cart3D Adjoint-module.

Cart3D v 1.4 released, Dec 2008
Performance improvements, support for on-the-fly component-wise force extraction, point and line sensors, see the full announcement.

Beta Release of Cart3D Adjoint-module Dec 2008
Output functionals drive mesh adaptation to meet user-specified error bounds. See details of the beta program. Get started with background reading here.

Cart3D meets sonic-boom propagation milestones in under 2hrs on a desktop workstation. Read about it here.

Cart3D's importance to NASA's future discussed in "Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications", (Chapman & Hall/CRC Computational Science Series) ed. D. Bader, Jan. 2008.

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2007

flowCart's hybrid parallel programming paradigm written-up and analyzed in the OpenMP textbook "Using OpenMP: Portable Shared Memory Parallel Programming" by Chapman, Jost and van der Pas. Oct. 2007

Cart3D used for analysis of Orion Launch Abort Vehicle. See the technical paper on this work.

Cart3D used in producing Orion Aero database for Constellation by NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate

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2006

Launch of Cart3D-Discuss discussion forum. Users and observers invited to browse on-line newsgroup, Feb, 2006

Software for Automated Generation of Cartesian Grids
NASA Tech Briefs, Vol.30 No. 1, Jan. 2006

Cart3D Hits 2.5 TFLOP/s on 2016 CPUs of NASA's Columbia Supercomputer
Compare performance with that of several top NASA solvers, Jan 2006.

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2005

Supercomputing SC|05,  Seattle, WA, Nov 2005
Best technical paper award "2005 News and Highlights"
SC|05 Press release

Cart3D v1.3.5 released,  Aug 2004
Improved limiters in flowCart, user-specified ratio of specific heats.