Chapter 984 Preliminary Round, We Have a Big Advantage

According to the plan, Liu Hongbo needs to stay in France for about a week——

After all, Dassault is a mature company. Even if Ed Steiner agrees with China's design in his heart, he can't just make a decision to adopt it.

Before final signing, the necessary tests still need to be done.

As a representative of China, although Liu Hongbo does not need to follow the entire process, he must at least be responsible for providing technical support and running through the basic testing process.

The Falcon Z project has a very tight schedule. Fortunately, as a relatively simple commercial project, there is nothing too much that is worth the internal friction of the four partners.

During this period, Chang Haonan, who finally returned to his normal work rhythm, also became busy again.

On the one hand, the Haiyang-1 satellite is approaching its launch window. Although most of the software and hardware adaptation work is done by Lin Senming, Chang Haonan still needs to step forward to check and finalize important nodes.

On the other hand, it is also relatively more energy-consuming, but it is preparing for the preliminary round of the numerical calculation competition.

When the organizers of the competition issued the suggestion of "asking special guests to write a question each to enrich the question bank", they received unusually enthusiastic feedback.

Most of those who can be included in the special invitation list have relatively high status in the industry.

As a discipline closer to engineering, in most cases, status is linked to experience.

Therefore, this suggestion directly awakened the memories of many big shots.

Everyone refined and abstracted the classic or interesting problems they encountered from more than ten years ago to recently and threw them up.

There is quite an attitude of wanting to deprive the contestants of their smiles forever.

Song Jingming even received a lot of emails, saying that he was inspired to write questions, and that one question could not cover the rich experience he had accumulated over decades. He strongly suggested increasing the number of questions that each person could submit...

All in all, it's very frustrating.

Finally, in order to prevent many contestants from being overwhelmed in the preliminary stage, Chang Haonan had no choice but to set limits on the difficulty and calculation time of the questions.

This made one of the professors working at CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) put away the bold idea of ​​throwing the nuclear fusion theory research project "Plasma Fluid CFD" into the question bank...

As a compromise, each special guest is allowed to provide up to two questions. .

Fortunately, although the process was a bit tortuous, the final result was not bad.

Before the preliminary round at the end of February, the organizers of the conference selected three questions under the witness of several special guests.

According to the competition regulations, all participating teams need to submit engineering documents and design documentation within 120 hours from the release of the topic. The final score will be calculated based on the sum of the two highest scores among the three questions.

It can be regarded as a relatively satisfactory rule in this era.

Therefore, almost all teams that have signed up and are interested in truly reaching the finals focus on the three questions themselves.

The question release time is set at 9 a.m. on February 23, Beijing time.

Not very friendly to European contestants.

They need to get up in the middle of the night to read the questions and then start answering them immediately.

But for Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, it happened to be the night before.

In Professor Anthony Jameson's office.

Richard Heltz, and two groups of participating students.

In addition to a group from Stanford, the other three are from Santa Clara University not far away.

Although this school has an engineering school, it does not specialize in the field of engineering, so Professor Jameson easily found several contestants who wanted to participate through his personal connections——

Although the competition regulations do not have a reference teacher, it does not say that pre-competition training cannot be done.

The six people in front of him are the second of the "seeded players" he found.

Of course, for such a big matter, it is impossible to just set up double insurance and everything will be fine.

In fact, COMSOL has signed a total of about 30 participating teams.

About two-thirds of them are competitive.

However, these teams are scattered across the United States, and there are even two teams from Europe. It is impossible to travel all the way to the San Francisco Bay Area for a preliminary round.

Moreover, it’s just a matter of providing guidance in the name of pre-match training and doing it secretly. If it really makes too much noise, it will not look good on everyone’s face.

"There are less than 5 minutes left before the question time..."

Haltz glanced down at his watch and was the first to break the silence.

In fact, there is an electronic clock hanging on the wall of the office, which does not need to tell time this time.

He simply felt that the atmosphere here was a bit depressing, so he just found a random topic.

Sure enough, after he started, the students who had been reluctant to speak just now were a little unable to hold back.

"Professor, how likely do you think this question is to be beneficial to us?"

A girl named Hermia Moreno asked.

"I can't see all the questions in the question bank."

Jameson had been like a statue, staying in the same posture on the chair for almost an hour. It was not until he heard this question that he finally moved a little:

"In general, the scope of the question is mainly in the field of CFD, but it does not necessarily include only CFD. It can also be appropriately combined with other means."

"If it is a classic type of problem such as continuous fluid turbulence, that is the most obvious advantage for us. But on the other hand, if the problem involves granular fluid, or a super-large-scale calculation interval, it is not suitable to use finite volume at all. The situation with the law is relatively unfavorable..."

In fact, Jameson didn’t know the details in this regard until he participated in setting the question.

Therefore, while waiting for the question to be released, he was not completely stress-free.

"Professor Jameson."

If there is anyone here who values ​​the results of the game the most, it is naturally Heltz, who is the middle manager of COMSOL:

"You said before that there is unlikely to be open cheating on the part of the organizer such as leaking the questions, but will they do anything in the process of selecting the questions?"

This issue is a little bit sensitive.

Even Jameson hesitated for a while.

"I can't say."

He shook his head:

"Logically, they invited all the question makers to witness the question selection process. Although most people are unlikely to make a special trip for this matter, in the end they will choose who accepts the invitation. The organizer There is no way to control the edges, so if you want to manipulate the process, there are too many uncontrollable factors.”

"But having said that, if they want to regain their advantage in the CFD field, then manipulating the problem range is indeed a cost-effective way..."

Once people communicate with each other, the feeling of torment that lasts for seconds will be much weaker.

Therefore, before you know it, the last five minutes have passed...

"Beep, beep -"

The timer that had been set sounded a beep, which was particularly harsh in the office building at night.

Jameson sat up straight at the speed of light, silenced the sound with one hand, and clicked refresh on the web page with the other hand.

The Torch Group is very willing to spend money on servers, so the question-writing website will not crash directly after being clicked by tens of thousands of people like the course selection websites of some schools in later generations.

After about a minute, a PDF document was downloaded to the computer desktop.

Jameson's hands were shaking a little, and he didn't even open the file until he double-clicked it for the second time.

“The mechanism of soil particle migration by groundwater seepage involves the particle-fluid coupling process at the mesoscopic scale, that is, particle-scale soil movement, fluid flow and particle-fluid interaction..."

Looking at the title displayed on the first page, several people couldn't help but feel nervous.

What are you afraid of?

This particle-fluid problem, and it is also an infinite boundary problem such as groundwater seepage, is almost difficult to solve with a simple finite volume method. It is the "worst case scenario" that Jameson just mentioned.

"No way……"

Haltz's tone was a little annoyed.

Although Jameson said nothing, he frowned.

However, he still patiently turned to the second page.

"For a subsonic aircraft with a cockpit, there is an object surface streamline diagram as shown in the figure. The figure shows the flow separation area on the leeward side of an inverted cone, and the flow separation point on the leeward side is a saddle point..."

The brows of Jameson and several students gradually widened.

This problem is so simple that it is almost impossible to fully reflect the advantages of COMSOL Multiphysics. For some experienced people, it can even be solved by making their own wheels.

However, for their purposes, it was enough.

"This question is just like... an example question from a textbook."

Hermia said with a half-smile.

"Don't underestimate the enemy too much."

Although Jameson was obviously in a good mood, he still warned:

"I'm afraid that the vast majority of teams will choose this question among the three choices. In fact, it is more of a test of basic skills..."

As he spoke, he continued to turn the pages and came to the last question.

"Assume that the cross-sectional profile of the river bed bottom in a shallow water area conforms to the equations shown in (3-1) below, and water can be regarded as an incompressible fluid... Please establish a mathematical format to simulate two-dimensional shallow water flow..."

"etc……"

Another student next to him immediately widened his eyes:

"This question..."

"I seem to have... seen something similar during training before?"

He turned his head in disbelief and looked at his companions.

Then I saw the same answer from the eyes of others...

"We have a huge advantage!"

If we say that after seeing the second question just now, Jameson's mentality was just happy.

So now, what he feels is...

ecstasy.

In fact, the submitter of this question was Professor Jameson himself.

He and Hertz had conceived many possibilities in advance, but they never thought it would go so smoothly...

For a moment, Jameson even felt a little guilty for his initial thoughts——

It was obvious that the Chinese did not do anything.

These three questions were indeed randomly selected.

Otherwise, it would be impossible to be so beneficial to them...