Is CFD "Moving to the Left"?

We recently added a user friendly CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software (CFD-CADalyzer) to our offering that brought back memories of a decade old marketing catch phrase.

I remember when in the 90s the idea that FEM/FEA was "moving to the left" started to go around. It basically meant that the latest generation of FEM/FEA products were easy to use and affordable enough to be run directly by designers, hence moving to the early stages of the design process ("to the left"). Now the concept that designers have access to FEM/FEA reached the mainstream. Alibre offers FEA/FEM tools bundled with its Design Professional version, SolidWorks bundles COSMOSXpress with every version and other CAD vendors offer similar combinations. FEM/FEA has permanently moved to the left.

The advantage of having designers do more analysis is mostly centered on the idea that by verifying their designs with analysis tools before passing them downstream for further development they will weed out the most obvious errors. This will speed up the design loop cycle by reducing the amount of required design changes due to problems found only when performing costly advanced analysis or testing prototypes. One ancillary benefit to this is that, over time, designers develop better intuition and understanding of structural issues further reducing the number of early stage design problems.

So is it CFD’s turn to "move to the left"? I think the answer is a resounding yes. Today’s meshing (FEM) tools for CFD are reasonably user friendly and can certainly be proficiently used by design engineers, and CFD solvers are now capable of providing meaningful results in a decent time frame running on a modern Personal Computer.

This means that designers can access tools that allow them to simulate flow dynamics, heat transfer, cooling and several other conditions before passing their designs downstream. Thanks to this, companies that are first to deploy CFD tools onto their designer’s workstations will reap the benefits of designing better products faster.

Cristiano Sacchi

Comments

[Eric]

i am not familiar with FEM/FEA...what is it?..

[Cristiano Sacchi]

Eric,
You will find a good overview of FEA and FEM on Wikipedia on these pages: Finite Element Analysis and FEM.

[Arnold Rowntree]

"We recently added... to our offering."

I would love to see CFD move to the 'left' too. Christiano, do you stand to profit if it does?
Good for you if you do.

What's needed to open the door is information and tuition more than bundled software.

[Yannis]

Hello guys...i am a student in a Univeristy of Greece but that s not the case..actually i m going to use CFD for my thesis..so i have a big problem..i dont know if it s possible to transfer models from AutoCad to CFD..And if it is i would be grateful if sb could explain to me how i can achieve that.. Thx

[Derrek Cooper]

Yannis, yes check the ability of writing an SAT/Acis file from AutoCAD. Better yet, get your hands on Inventor, an Autodesk product. What CFD program are you using in school?

[Derrek Cooper]

CFD is definitely moving to the "left".. Many products out there in the Upfront CFD market..