Today's Generation Instinctively Understands Upfront CFD

I was working last night on a few things and my little girl (21mos), came over and grabbed my mouse as she likes the red light underneath. Typically, I just disable it and she will play with it for awhile. But this time she went straight for the mouse pad and began moving her little fingers to position the mouse. Did she know exactly what she was doing, probably not. But she proceeded to explore, hit a few keys and an application opened. She was thrilled. Point is, today's generation, which is tomorrow's engineers, are born in an era where computers are the standard. It will only evolve from here. They allow today, what couldn't even be conceived yesterday.

The challenge for today's engineer's is to think outside of the box and use different, more modern methods to design better products. Years and years of man hours have been honed to develop testing procedures and best practices. Now software vendors are coming in and saying there is a better way. "Can't be! There is no way that the computer can give us the same reliable results. We don't trust the results". This is the challenge.

It is up to the software vendor to provide you with the confidence that the tool can reduce the number of prototypes and that it can provide you valuable insight that testing simply cannot. The vendor does this through reputation, years of experience, testing of their own and years of hard work. Ensure that they have put the same amount of care into validating their solution as you have to yours. It's the same thing.

I think deep down, it is a hard value proposition to deny. Upfront CFD/CAE/FEA, whatever, is here to stay. It simply works. It is obviously, not for everyone. There are some engineering houses that are dealing with problems beyond the scope of upfront analysis. For those, you either hire a specialist or you outsource.. However, if you partner with the right company, there are many ways to approach many different problems.

New, young engineers will not know a time that Upfront analysis, was not the norm. Exciting time for them, actually. They are coming into the market with high expectations. "Of course, I should be able to leverage my CAD model!" "Of course, the mesh is automatic. Why wouldn't it be?" It is a part of the way they think, they will want to get their hands on the software and try various things because they are not intimidated.

They are used to instant gratification. It is a part of their DNA. They are used to the idea that if you don't have it, someone will, and I will buy their stuff. It really pushes us in the software world to excel. I love it!! It forces me to fight and do a really good job to make satisfied users. That, to me, is job satisfaction at its finest.