The Virtual Engineer » critical path http://www.derrekcooper.com Life Experiences in the Virtual Engineering World Sun, 27 Nov 2011 11:40:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Making Upfront CFD Part of the Critical Path http://www.derrekcooper.com/2008/07/making-upfront-cfd-part-of-the-critical-path/ http://www.derrekcooper.com/2008/07/making-upfront-cfd-part-of-the-critical-path/#comments Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:01:00 +0000 derrek.cooper http://www.derrekcooper.com/?p=90 Often, after a demo, people say that they love what they have seen. Yes, they could “probably” use Upfront CFD to optimize flow paths, increase performance, even prevent failure. BUT!, they are getting by without it. Therefore, “we will have some selling to do to convince their management”. We immediately get placed in the “nice to have” category.

Fair enough. However, time and time again we hear stories of how expensive it can be to find out that a product actually failed in the field. Check out this little gem of a story of LED’s overheating in Boston. It is super critical to be able to manage the temperatures of the LEDs or you can cut their life-expectancy in half. Do a quick search on this blog for more info on LEDs. Below is a shot of a model, we recently worked on showing the air recirculating in the head of a lamp assembly.

Check out this article, which highlights how Daktronics avoided some of the issues of the folks in Boston. I don’t want this to be solely viewed as a sales pitch. As technology evolves and we as engineers are pushing the limits, we should begin designing smarter and more efficient.

There was a time, in the not so distant past, where 2D AutoCAD was considered revolutionary. We have to evolve and make Upfront CAE part of the critical path. Once this is the standard, what’s next?

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