What is it like growing up in the CFD world?

I have worked in the Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) world for over 10 years. I have been fortunate enough to have worked with numerous products ranging from nearly all commercial CAD tools to ANSYS and other FEA tools. But the majority of my time has been devoted to the CFD world. Graduate work involved doing fluid flow measurements in the lab.

I then moved into writing small portions of CFD code to using some developed by others for specific applications. At the time, these codes seemed awesome. It was amazing what they could do at the time. Imagine spending a few weeks creating a grid by hand and being fascinated at seeing a few vectors on the screen.

But as we all know computer power and commercial CFD codes have come leaps and bounds since then. I love the fact that CAD vendors are being pushed to make their products easier and faster etc. Simulation software is not far behind.

There has always been a belief that if an analysis product is too easy to use, than it must not be any good? Pretty funny when you read it, isn't it? But its been a myth out there for along time.

I think we owe it to ourselves to push the vendors to create products that are not only cutting edge, but easy to use and make us more productive engineers.

PTC buying CoCreate? More on that in a bit....