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5 Myths of CFD
October 12, 2010 Design World Staff : 0 Comments
By Dr. Ivo Weinhold, Product Marketing Manager, Mentor Graphics, Mechanical Analysis Division, Wilsonville,
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Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation has long had the reputation of being too difficult, slow, and expensive
to be performed as part of the mainstream design process. That may have been true 10 years ago, but CFD has
changed over the past decade and today has become much easier, faster, and less expensive to use. Yet, myths are
standing in the way of greater use in the early phases of mechanical design. These myths help explain why only about
30,000 out of over 1 million mechanical design engineers worldwide use CFD to simulate fluid flow inside and around
their products.
1. The skills required to operate the CFD software are simple knowledge of the CAD system
and the physics of the product, both of which the vast majority of design engineers already
possess. FlowEFD Pro is fully embedded in Pro/E Wildfire.
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The skills required to operate the CFD software are simply knowledge of the CAD system and the physics of the
product, both of which the vast majority of design engineers already possess. The engineer is able to focus on his/her
time and attention on optimizing the performance of the product as opposed to operating the software.
Myth #2: CFD takes too long to use during the design process
CFD has long been used as a validation step after the design process has been essentially completed. The major
reason is that in the past CFD took so long that if a design iteration were to be analyzed during the design process, it
would have been superseded by other iterations before the analysis results were available. The greatest amount of
time is spent during the meshing process. This used to require a time-consuming manual step of translating the
geometry from the CAD software to the CFD package. From this point, another tedious step was required to extract
the cavities from the CAD model and then mesh them. While automatic meshers have long been available, a
considerable amount of manual intervention was still needed in order to maintain the quality of the mesh by
eliminating gaps and overlaps, and maintaining the required skewness, aspect ratio, warpage, and volume of
individual cells. This manual process had to be repeated for every design change.
The new generation of CFD software greatly reduces the time required for analysis by automating all of these steps.
In the new approach, native 3D CAD data is used directly for fluid flow simulations without the need for translations
or copies. All ancillary data required for flow simulations, such as material properties and boundary conditions is
associatively linked to the CAD model and carried along with all design changes. The software analyzes the CAD model
and automatically identifies fluid and solid regions without user interaction. Then the automatic mesher creates the
mesh while maintaining the skewness, aspect ratio, warpage, and volume to high levels of quality, completely
eliminating the need for any manual intervention. The result is that new parts and design changes can be meshed in a
matter of minutes, dramatically reducing the time required for analysis.
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The latest generation of CFD code intended for use during the mainstream design process substantially reduces the
cost of performing CFD. The cost of the software has fallen to something in the order of $25,000 for a perpetual
license, with the only ongoing cost being a maintenance fee of about 18%/yr. This software eliminates the need for
analytical specialists because it can be used by mechanical design engineers with minimal training. The software runs
inside the same CAD environment that design engineers are already familiar with, and there is no need for the user to
understand the mathematical aspects of CFD. Finally, the latest generation of CFD software runs on PCs and laptops
which have the power possessed by a supercomputer only a decade ago but cost just a few thousand dollars.
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Myth #4: You cant directly use your CAD model to do CFD analysis
In the past, it was necessary to copy or translate the CAD model to a different program and then modify it
substantially in order to create the CFD model. The main reason was that the tools available to translate the CAD
model to the CFD program required a considerable amount of manual intervention. Typically, the translation process
might work for 80% of the geometry but the rest had to be re-created or simplified by hand. Many users found it more
reliable to start from scratch by creating the geometry in the CFD program, although this also involved a considerable
expenditure of time.
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4. FloEFD V5 is embedded in the CATIA V5. Concurrent CFD software uses the native 3D CAD data directly for
flow simulations without the need for translations.
The new generation of CFD software uses the native 3D CAD data directly for flow simulations without the need for
translations or copies. All design changes based on simulation results are carried out directly in the CAD system using
familiar solid modelling functions. There is no need to create phantom objects in the feature tree to represent the
fluid spaces. Flow conditions are defined directly on the CAD model and organized similarly to other design data in the
feature tree. As a result, the original CAD model can be used without modification for CFD analysis.
Myth #5: Most products dont need CFD analysis
In the past, the use of CFD has been concentrated in a relatively small number of industries such as automotive,
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In the past, the use of CFD has been concentrated in a relatively small number of industries such as automotive,
aerospace, and power generation producing high-value products in which fluid flow has an obvious and major impact
on performance. This has led to the belief among many that CFD only adds value to these high-value products.
Actually, fluid flow has a major impact on the performance of a wide range of products performance which can be
significantly improved by analysis. Every product which interacts with a fluid or gas and every production process
involving fluids or gases is a potential subject of analysis. This helps explain why today CFD is being used to improve
products as diverse as swimming pools, toilets, lawn sprinklers, gas meters, production printing system, disk drives,
and oil filters.
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5. CFD softwares ability to integrate CFD into the design process allows design
engineers to focus on the physics of the problem, which in most cases, they
already understand well and generate results more quickly.
Mentor Graphics
www.mentor.com
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