I can’t say I am necessarily above asking for you to help and vote for “Blue Ridge Numerics” in the NASA Tech Briefs Product of the Year poll. So, here is my request to consider voting for us this year.
But, I will give you a few solid reasons why I think we deserve it.
Abnormal obsession to helping our customers solve flow and thermal design challenges.
Constant strive to listen, understand and implement changes to our product to help the world that has been historically intimidated to even consider CFD, not only solve their problems but unleash innovation.
Unwavering dedication to helping people adopt a “new way” of product development in lieu of a crappy economy.
Undying determination to go up against goliath software companies to deliver a solution for the people, because its who we are to the core.
Seems a bit over the top, doesn’t it? Anyone that has done business with us or has spoken to any of us, realizes in a few minutes that it is genuine. Genuine passion to exceed expectations…
Feels as though technology is moving at the speed of light. Things are changing so much and so quickly, that it is easy to be overwhelmed. Many of us try and keep up, not an easy job. But, probably more of the world sit back and miss 90%+ of the “new stuff”.
It is challenging enough to stay up to date on the latest release of CAD or CFD software that you are driving everyday, much less begin to care about the future. However, I find myself fascinated with the up and coming tech that I feel will have a dramatic effect on my efficiency or ability to stay connected or quite frankly what I think is simply — cool. I find myself permanently attached to my iphone. I am away from my computer more and more with travel and a fast moving life in general. The apps I use most are twitterrific, facebook, evernote, dropbox, gmail, email and fotos (flickr). Common theme here, I like to feel connected.
I began to think, how could we at CFdesign, begin to leverage mobile technology? A bit too premature to speculate, I think. But, how about CAD? Obviously CAD is a “heavy” application, so how can CAD leverage the mobile device world. Enter – Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile and Dassault Systems 3DVIA.
These are drastically different tools that are geared to serve different markets. One thing that they have in common is conceptual modeling. The most amazing thing to me is that both are an example of how the CAE space is emerging into mainstream, simply by offering these tools via the App Store. One million plus downloads to date and recently has been named top ten best app of 2009 for its category. That is truly an amazing feat. There are 100k+ apps out there.
Check out what a totally non-artistic (in the classical sense) dude, like me, can whip out of Sketchbook in all of about 3-4mins. Below is a quick rendition of CFdesign’s logo.
Sketchbook’s interface is amazing. Really intuitive, immediately you get it. Sure, I can’t come close to doing what some of the folks out in the world are doing, but I completely understand the interface, it has a look and feel of Autodesk Fusion. Many of the images I have seen are more artistic in nature, but I can clearly see a place in the manufacturing space, where you want to sketch out a quick conceptual image, leveraging the iphone camera and different layers. The real testament will be how people will integrate these images into their daily lives inside Alias and Inventor, as well as other CAD platforms – only time will tell.
3DVIA is bit of a different animal altogether. It is targeted more toward the true 3D world. It actually has a closer connection to my world. It is a super simple 3D modeler, but it is taking 3D to a new place. It claims to be a “web based” tool. In reality the models exist online, only online. The idea is that you store, share and search 3D models from the online community. I just jumped on my iphone, did a search for “valve” in the 3DVIA mobile app, found the below model, snagged an image and uploaded to flickr, then linked to this post. All of the above happened in less than a minute, including download/upload time. Truly amazing.
So, what does this all mean for the CAE community? It’s just the tip of iceberg of where all of this will take us. It definitely takes the “early adopter” mentality to really get where all this is going. But, the engineering community is under siege of emerging technology that will absolutely change the way we design and engineer.
I am the first to acknowledge that not all the new technology being rolled out will stick and we haven’t even come close to seeing what’s to come. It is perfectly clear that engineering is crossing into the chasm of outwit and outsmart. Those that embrace new methods and new technology will have a massive advantage. Those that are conservative and afraid of change will struggle.
Really psyched to announce that we are looking for a real out of the box thinker to fill a position as a Product Marketing Manager. This is a unique opportunity to work in a young, fast paced environment. We define the cliche of work hard, play hard.
If you have a solid understanding of the CAE software space and want to join a team that is redefining the way companies look and interact with CFD, send us your goods and lets talk.
The epitome of upfront cfd is leveraging the results from your fluid flow and heat transfer simulation to help drive design. The results need to answer the question whether a design or a scenario passed or failed. The results should also provide some insight to why it passed or failed and should help the design engineer make better design decisions. Everything else, is simply gravy.
We have been obsessed with this idea from the beginning. We have talked to literally 1000s of design engineers and the message we are hearing is that they want an environment that fosters decision making. The workflow needs to be super intuitive and a key is to be able to identify critical values and compare this data very easily.
CFdesign 2010 takes upfront cfd to a new level. The brand new environment has been optimized for multi-scenario design studies. Everything from the setup workflow, to the lightweight architecture that makes multiple scenarios possible all the way to the brand new Decision Center that makes decision making…well, exactly what it should be…simple!
Don’t take my word for it, take a look for yourself.
I’m the first to admit to not being a power user of UG, but over the last few years I have been driving the NX versions from time to time. I always thought it was fairly stable, but like all of the other high end CAD systems, I felt overwhelmed by the shear magnitude of features that I never really turned to it as my CAD system of choice.
Well, things are a changing. I am fortunate enough to be surrounded by CAD power users everyday. All of the CFdesign engineers are power users of at least a few of the CAD systems. So between us we are a fierce CAD modeling group. There has always been a few guys singing the praises of UG, but I just chalked it up to “anything is easy when you know it”. The lights went on for me with NX6, I sat through a webex with one of our guys and he was presenting a knarly model that he did as a services project. He showed me the model as received from the customer. It was an assembly that consisted of a few CAD systems, a few STEP files and an IGES file thrown in for good measure.
He then proceeded to show me how quickly and robustly he was able to bring this dead horse back to life in a matter of no time. Check out the above preview of a minor fraction of what you can do with the ST stuff.
I will presenting this alongside CFdesign 2010 at the PLM World conference on June 4th. Click here for specifics. Would love to hear other’s experience with ST – both in NX and Solid Edge. Are people driving simulations with this stuff? I know we are seeing some awesome stuff. Let’s hear what you got..
Finally– some good news about somebody spending some freaking $$$ on a good thing.
Genuinely excited for these dudes. I could easily be classed as a fanboy of Spaceclaim as I have written about it enough. But, it’s more than that. It’s all about a group of folks that have some really cool technology and believe that there is a better way. They are rockin’ the market up a bit finding their way. I am hoping with some more cash, they will rock even harder. Their product is a score for anyone that has found bumps in the road with geometry when it comes to simulation, among other things.
It’s a tough world out there in the 3D CAD space, but all things are not created equal. There are some folks that just need to grab, pull, move. There some of us that need to merge, delete, align. Simple as that.
I consider myself fortunate to have a good relationship with quite a few of the folks there. Check out Kevin Leblanc putting it in his own words.. Good stuff boys, good luck!!
Everyone in the world blogged and posted about this a few weeks ago. I have been burning at both ends and neglecting the old blog. But figured it was worth a quick me too post. Check out the video below, it highlights some of the coolness.
Exciting to see our friends at Autodesk, jumping full bore into the simulation world. They are doing what thet do- taking tactful, well thought out implementation of the technology. Some might say a bit slow, some might say just fast enough. They have a dedicated audience of fanatical customers that can truly use some of the FEA capabilities coming from the Plassotech acquisition and expand out into the Mechanical Event Simulation stuff in Algor.
Personally, we have seen a huge interest from the Inventor community in flow and thermal simulation. The future for the Autodesk community looks bright, lots of cool stuff. Looking forward to the day when I am running flow simulations in CFdesign while sculpting my Inventor models with some of the Alias technology and morphing and pulling with Fusion. This day is not too far in the future
But what caught my attention was the first sentence, “If you’re a design engineer working in a “typical” manufacturing company, you may be spending60% to 80% of your time updating and optimizing old designs, or making changes for ECOs, instead of creating new designs.”
They are some bold statistics. There are a ton of companies that are putting themselves at risk updating and attempting to optimize old designs utilizing physical testing or good old intuition. Whether it is a brand new design or an improvement to an existing design, the main question is — how are design changes determined? Another question, why is a change required- did it fail in the field? If so, do you know why? How convinced are you that the failure will not happen in the future. Did you simply over-design it this time so that it will certainly not fail again? How much time are you wasting “re-designing”? For every minute you are spending “fixing things”, you are allowing your competitors to gain momentum. The old-guard way of over-designing is a death sentence in a rough economy. Companies literally cannot not afford to spend a ton of time and money physically testing everything. But yet, you cannot just wing it and hope for the best. If you are reading this and are finding that you are asking one or more of the questions above, now is the time to act.
Design decisions need proof of concept. Above is a model of the natural convection in and around an avionics assembly. The thermal management of this assembly was optimized over the course of a few days where a number of “what-if” scenarios were investigated before one physical prototype was created. Once the optimal digital design was identified, a physical model was built and tested for verification. Companies that are not conducting some level of digital design studies are putting themselves at risk. The technology is available, you need to see how it can help your bottom line.
The last thing I would say to someone is simply, go purchase some software, it will solve all of your problems. Investing in Upfront CFD or CAE tools is a true investment. You are investing in a technology that has to save you money and time but most importantly provides an opportunity for innovation. There are a few vendors that specialize in creating tools that are tested and proven to solve your problem.
CFdesign is focused on solving flow and thermal design challenges. We created and own the Upfront CFD market. I’m convinced that if you are finding yourself in a tough design environment that involves flow and/or thermal design challenges, we can help. Give one of the folks on our team a call, we have pretty much seen it all and can give you a straight forward solution to your problem.
Who is responsible for the thermal management of your electronics components? The answer to this question varies. Some companies rely on their mechanical engineers, others have dedicated thermal engineers. The tools used by these two groups tend to be quite different.
Some of the mechanical engineers have access to MCAD tools. It is a natural progression for these guys to leverage their existing geometric models and use an upfront tool for flow and thermal simulation. It allows for a nice compact environment where you can do parametric digital design studies right on the desktop. We, at CFdesign, have been helping companies solve their flow and thermal challenges for over 16 years in this space.
But there are a fair number of mechanical engineers and the majority of thermal engineers that do not drive MCAD tools everyday and rely on the mechanical designers for that part of the process. This group tends to gravitate to analyst type tools simply because up until recently, that was the only option. There is an unfortunate disconnect between the design guys and the thermal folks. There needs to be a bridge between the two extremes.
We have been seeing a fair amount of “gopher popping”. A silly term for engineers popping their heads up and looking around to see what’s out there. Times are tough and money is tight. They have been spending a tremendous amount of money on these analyst type tools. Many of these tools have gone through major acquisitions lately and they aren’t getting any cheaper.
A simple solution would be to engage with your mechanical group and leverage the models that already exist. But the simple fact is that you still want a fast intuitive modeler to put together some basic layouts, have the ability to read in ECAD data and often times chop away the excess of the MCAD model so that you can strip out only what you need.
There is a better way. Take a serious look at our friends at Spaceclaim. Above is a bit of an old skool demo I did about a year ago.. They have a super cool, intuitive modeler, reads in all the major MCAD data, has a slick ECAD reader and on top of that is completely integrated with CFdesign. Works exactly like it does with all of the MCAD tools. Open your model in CFdesign, run a simulation, make a change in Spaceclaim, copy all of your settings and compare your what-if scenario in CFdesign.
I need to update a demo to show the ECAD module, its pretty fierce. Ping me or my buddy Jeff, both be happy to show you the Spaceclaim/CFdesign combo.
Another year, another Holiday model from CFdesign. Nothing like waiting until the last minute, to get this one out the door. Better late than never. Stay tuned, I have another awesome model to post from the boys at SpaceClaim.
