My opinion–simulation hasn’t been adopted in organizations due to lack of pain and vision. Many people spend a great deal of time talking themselves out of investing in new technology, rather than looking at their existing process and considering, “how could we improve our current process?”

If you aren’t feeling the pain currently or lack the vision to step outside the box and look to improve, you most likely will toe the line of status quo.

The sad part is your competitors aren’t doing the same.

I think my friend, “the cloud”, has gotten a bad rap. It definitely took a ribbing at SolidWorks World 2010, where engineers were trying to make a drinking game out of it all. My sense is that its easy to make fun of something that you either don’t quite understand or that you don’t exactly see the value. I suspect its the latter in most cases.

If you have read anything on The Virtual Engineer, you will know that I am a huge fan boy of the good ole “cloud”. What is my definition of the cloud? In very simple terms it is web-enabled, web-based, web-hosted, web-stored, web-collaborated computing. Common theme here, “the web”. We all use it, many of us depend on it and some of are are even slightly addicted to it.

upfront cfd external flow simulaiton

So, why does using the word cloud cause anxiety? I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time, because I clearly don’t get it. Am I the minority? Not sure. But, it dawned on me the other day that I have felt the pain of “the old way”. If you haven’t, I’m not sure you will appreciate the value. The old way is a collage of bloated hard drives, sorry-ass USB external drives, various copies of files, handfuls of thumb drives full of stuff. I’m tired of being a VPNing, remote desktoping, begging for more horse power, tired of ftp-ing slave to status quo. I want a new way. I want to have access to my files, wherever, from whatever- laptop, netbook, iphone. If I want to share my files, I want to be able to send a link to someone with highly encrypted password protected safety. I want to be able to, at a minimum, preview my files in a browser. How can I be the minority? Doesn’t everyone want this?

But, the above is just the tip of it. I’m a simulation driven, upfront CAE doing, design guy. I am drinking a Big Gulp size of the the Kool-Aid. But, you want to talk about pain. I’m not sure there is a better reason today for engineers to openly embrace the cloud than in the simulation community. But not just the simulation community, the “upfront cfd” simulation community. Why?

1. Design engineers tend to want to try numerous what-if scenarios, resulting in numerous back to back runs that ideally could run around the clock
2. CFD models are getting bigger and bigger and are requiring more and more power
3. Every design engineering department on the planet is trying to reduce cost of hardware, minimize capital investment- so paying for what you need, when you need it is a no-brainer
4. More and more engineers find that they are on the go, out of the office and need access to their data, models, computing power from anywhere

I think we are on the cusp of a major break through in the way we engineer. There are a ton of things that need to be figured out. Security, licensing, bandwidth, hardware etc are simply just the basics that need to be worked out. Exciting to see some of the most talented people in the world working on it.

Unfortunately, they took the “top down” approach. They were both respectively veterans in the CAE space that had “analyst” tools that were successful in their own right, and now they were changing their tune and exposing their technology to the design community. They found themselves in a very difficult place. They were taking what they knew and tried putting it in different terms. So, the end result was making FEA “easy to use” and making structural analysis “possible for design engineers”. But, I bet if you poll engineers and ask them how many are looking for an “easy to use FEA tool” or an FEA tool created for “design engineers”. I suspect, you will get a mixed bag. Let’s face it, most engineers are not looking for an FEA tool or a CFD tool, for that matter.

Engineers and their managers are looking for a tool that allows them to make better design decisions, reduce the number or physical prototypes, provide information whether a design passed or failed based on some failure criteria. Right? Most engineers could care less that its FEA or CFD. They expect and in many cases, demand that its easy to use. They also should not have to deal with status quo. They need tools that help them make decisions.

Where am I going with this? Don’t be fooled when looking to improve your design process. Don’t just get in line and assume that the “traditional analysis” companies or even worse, the MCAD companies, really understand how to help you make better design decisions. Each one of them is focused 100% in what they do. And what they don’t do is upfront CAE.

Traditional FEA/CFD companies are focused on working with analysts. MCAD companies are focused on 3D design. Each has a “solution” for you or so they claim. But, the reality is they are not focused on what you need.

There are very few companies that know and own the “upfront” FEA and CFD markets. Go out there, bang on google, cream rises to the top.

Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself. But, don’t believe the hype. Make sure you are making the right decision.

The Problem

MCAD tools have been around for awhile, they were built from the ground up to design 3D parts, generate 2D prints and the like. They can be fairly intensive programs with tons of features. Many companies have laid an FEA program on top of this foundation and have been fairly successful. SolidWorks Simulation is super popular for structural simulation. It does a great job for design level simulation. Structural simulation is fairly straight forward these days. Users tend to plot deformation and von mises (others as well) stresses to determine if something passed or failed. Often, you can get away with a simple static image to compare across designs.

In CFD, we tend to look at “pressure drop”, “peak velocity”, “max temperature” etc. We use these values as our pass/fail criteria. But this static data isn’t enough to tell you why one design passed over the other. A static image often just doesn’t cut it. This is where Concurrent CFD begins to break down. The CFD system is laid on top of the heavyweight CAD system, so having the ability and flexibility to compare models quickly and easily in 3D becomes impossible. You are now spitting out images and laying them on your desk, really hard to see what’s going on “inside” the model. This is one of the fundamental differences between CFD and structural FEA. The action of structural FEA happens on the outside (surface of the model). With CFD, the magic, often happens on the inside. In other words, having the ability to slice/dice and COMPARE in 3D is essential.

Often, users find that the honeymoon of CFD living inside their CAD system lasts for a very short time. Many of the CAD embedded programs are developed by 3rd parties which requires them to add functionality on top of the CAD framework. The result is that you have 20+ brand new dialog boxes that are popping up on the screen. So are you really in a familiar environment anymore? I’d argue that all of the familiarity and comfort of flying around in your CAD tool goes out the window. You are often locked down by wizards and forced to follow a specific recipe. This works fantastic day 1 of training, but many of us want to take off the training wheels and do it our way.

The Solution

Upfront CFD isn’t a new term to learn. It’s been around for 18 years. It has been developed from day 1 to address one simple purpose – to empower design engineers to solve fluid flow and thermal design challenges early and throughout the entire design process. Upfront CFD has all of the comforts of your CAD system- mouse operations are the same, layout is native and clean (works exactly the way you expect), CAD materials and attributes are read directly from the native CAD system as well as being fully associative. But the gem of Upfront CFD is the ability to properly do what-if scenarios.

The real impact of Upfront CFD is the ability to conduct multi-scenario design studies in a single environment. The environment is completely associative, you can clone designs or scenarios and update any change made to the CAD model. These clones are extremely lightweight, not simply entire copies of the previous, and give you the flexibility and power to do numerous what-if scenarios. Automation is one of the fundamental concepts of Upfront CFD. The data can be reused intelligently from one scenario to the next with a simple click of a button as well as being reused for future simulations.

multi-scenario design study environment

Once you have your defined results, whether they are critical values such as max temperature or pressure drop or 3D results, you can compare the data side by side instantly. Imagine having 4 designs that you want to see the flow behavior or temperature profile in 3D side by side? Click of a button in Upfront CFD, impossible in Concurrent or Traditional CFD. That’s the difference!

The Disclaimer

Many of you know this, but fair to state that I’m the Product Manager for CFdesign, so this may come across as grand standing. Not my intention. I am just trying to lay out some of the facts and dispel the myths. There is a place in the world for traditional CFD- PhD-type research problems, extremely massive models that require compute farms to crank out and when comparison is not important. This is a fairly niche market, but valid nonetheless. Same goes for Concurrent CFD. The market is even a bit more niche as it caters to very simple problems, that are fairly small in size and complexity and comparison is of little value.

Don’t take my word for it- go out there and check it out. Google it all- the facts are there.

I purchased a submersible pump (Water Ace Model R6S) model from Lowe’s or Home Depot a few years ago for just such an occasion. Fortunately, I have only needed to use it only a few times and it has saved me a ton of aggravation. It is amazing the volume of water that can accumulate in a very short time. I bet I pumped a few 100 gallons in less than an hour. It got me thinking of all the pump engineers I have spoken to over the years and it was really cool to use a device where some engineer somewhere in the world designed it so that it just worked. Maybe, just maybe CFdesign (or some CFD software) played a contributing factor on the design.

Check out the pump above in action. Got me also thinking, about my expectations as a consumer of what appears to be a simple device. I want to just stick it in the watery/muddy mess and turn it on and miraculously it just works. Fact is, that is basically what has happened, every time I used it. But in reality, what appears to be a simple device is pretty sophisticated. It has moving parts internally, tight clearances and is expected to prime itself and pump “whatever”. Obviously the rain water gets mixed with the sand and dirt from my cellar floor as well as all kinds of debris it picks up along the way. There is a very simple screen on the suction side that allows the debris to collect in a pile instead of being suctioned into the impeller etc. But, watching the discharge end its pretty obvious that this “simple” pump is working it and pumping all kinds of stuff.

Not trivial stuff to design, obviously. We have worked with the folks at Pentair Pumps (parent company of Water Ace folks) for a few years as well as many other pump manufactures.

Take, Cornell Pumps shown above for example, we have helped them reduce the amount of prototyping. There is a long list of things Upfront CFD can do to help such as providing flow rate, pressure head, performance curve data, efficiencies and torque to name a few of the basics. But where we really help is seeing inside the device, which simply can’t be seen in a testing environment.

At the end of the day, the cleanup was no fun at all. But it always brings a smile to see products designed by mechanical engineers that just work as expected, easy to forget the blood, sweat and tears that was put into the design.

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

Obviously, this post is mostly in fun. But it does point out a few things.

“I work for a really cool software company.”

“Wow, who?” (said w. enthusiasm)

“Well, a relatively small company that develops design software for engineers” (said w. enthusiasm)

“Oh, sounds interesting.” (said politely)

“Yea, it’s awesome, we help engineers create really innovative designs, by reducing the number of physical prototypes, we turn their computers into a virtual prototyping environments. It allows engineers to turn their computers into a virtual flow bench, wind tunnel or thermal test rig!! Allows them to really understand how to improve their product performance by seeing how they work in 3D.”

“yea, wow, hmmm…I am going to grab another beer, you want anything!”

I am fortunate enough to work with a bunch of guys that are super excited about what we do. We all spin it a bit different, but in the end, we are all saying the same thing. Here’s a classic…