Who has not seen the "The Last Lecture"?

It was announced earlier this week that Randy Pausch lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. He is famous for his final lecture delivered at Carnegie Mellon last year. If you haven't seen it, you owe it to yourself to watch it.

It is the most inspirational story I have ever heard. Truly, live each day to the fullest.

CFD-tv: A New Way to View CFdesign

In the early days of CAE software, user's took great pride in reading the User's Manual cover to cover. We were all intimately familiar with the Help system. It was the only way to really be able to do anything beyond flow in a pipe. A common response you would receive when calling technical support was, "RTFM!" Ahh, the good ole days.

Safe to say, that today is a new day and the user's expectations have grown several orders of magnitude since the good ole RTFM days. Computers, mobile phones, ipods etc are apart of our everyday lives. We have grown past having to call technical support on how to use software. Sure, we still may call when we are totally stuck. But, in general, people want to have options when looking for answers to their questions.

Some folks are into the User's Guide, some want to call their favorite support guy, some love online Forums and there are those of us that simply want to watch a quick video. I don't want to watch a 30minute video on the history of pump modeling. I just want you to give me a quick overview. Ideally, I would like to watch the video a few times as I am following along. Reading about it is of little value to me, I want to see it.

This mentality sparked the birth of CFD-tv. It is a library of videos 1-5mins in length that provide our user's with audio and video to help them overcome some of their common support questions, provide insight on a new application or learn tips and tricks from some of our power user's. The library is available on our Customer Portal or right within the Help system inside the interface.

Let us know what you think!!

Taking on Goliath

I feel like I am a fairly progressive adopter of new technology, the latest thing etc. However, I am usually a bit behind the early adopters. Meaning, I love trying out the coolest new thing, but rarely am I the first guy on it. I usually need someone else to be the guinea pig and give me a taste.

Enter Firefox. I have heard from close to everyone how cool Firefox is and felt way behind. So I just downloaded and installed Firefox3. Very cool from a User's Experience. I wont bore you with all of the cool features. What I noticed is how simple the process was to install. I downloaded, installed and it recognized IE, grabbed all of my favorites/bookmarks etc. I was up and running in a few mins. Clean, non-cluttered interface. Awesome!

I have always been a fan of Microsoft for the most part, so I am not a renegade guy always going against the grain. But the Mozilla guys took a huge chance going against the behemoth who essentially "gives away" their browser but they are still gaining ground everyday. There is a great interview in Wired this month with the Mozilla CEO. It is extremely expiring to see a group of people that believe in what they do, ban together and make a difference.

A great friend and mentor recently said...

"Do not think that a few people with a common purpose can not change the world, indeed, it is the only thing that ever has..."

Making Upfront CFD Part of the Critical Path

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?

CFD Group on LinkedIn

I came across LinkedIn about a year ago. At first, I thought it was just another social networking site. But the more I use it, the more I understand that it is more of a professional networking site to contact colleagues (old and new), see how others in the industry are connected as well as posting a virutal resume for others to see.

As you would expect, there are "Groups" of like minded individuals that you can join. A recent Group that I joined is the Computational Fluid Dynamics Group. It is a group of professionals interested or connected to the CFD industry. The group was created by an old friend, Kamran Fouladi at InfoMec.

A newsletter is published monthly.

The release of CFdesign v10 is near

It is always an exciting time to see the press releases begin to appear announcing the latest and greatest. We have worked really hard to fine tune v10 to enhance the User Experience as much as possible. In the past, this tended to be a fancy word for an improved UI. Today, it goes beyond that a bit. Sure, the UI has been modernized, streamlined – overall, improved!

But we are dedicating much more attention to the overall User experience. In our world, that implies…

• Deeper CAD Connectivity
• Geometry tools specific to the Upfront CFD user
• Improved meshing- resulting in quicker, more accurate results
• Added physics such as Thermal Electric Coolers and a Cavitation Model
• An extremely new, fast way to perform Convection analyses
• Improved results visualization
• CFD-tv – on demand video explanation to answer common questions
• A new updated User Forum
  

The list can go on and on.. Check out the following site for a more detailed explanation.

When Everyday Life & CFD Converge

My wife convinced me to put a pool in our backyard. Probably not what you are thinking. You immediately thought in-ground, diving board with a slide and grotto, right? Not even close. We purchased an Easy Set Pool. You know the kind with the blow up ring at the top and you just fill it with water. Well, 3 pool fills later on uneven ground, the pool is up and running. "Easy" is all relative.

It comes with its own pumping filtration system. Enter the CFD part of the story. I turned it on initially and was amazed how quiet it was and the pumping power was amazing. Over the course of a couple weeks, I noticed that the pump was not cleaning the pool. I then noticed that there were large pockets of air at the discharge of the pump. I vented the pump numerous times and it seemed to be ok, but eventually would lose suction. Really cool to see cavitation in action and the effect it has on the performance of the pump.

Not one to read directions, I figured it was time. Sure enough, it recommended changing the filter on the pump every few weeks. I quickly changed out the filter and was having a great time checking out the internals of the pump, impeller, filter etc.. The filter was packed with all kinds of stuff, clearly impeding the performance of the pump. I have seen literally 100s of pump CAD models and run countless CFD analyses on pumps but haven't seen the inside of too many in person. I quickly re-assembled and the pump worked like a charm. It made me appreciate even more the challenges that manufactures have to go through everyday to ensure their products perform as expected. Competition is tough everywhere and you have to get it right the first time.

Above is a model we did for Davey Water Pumps awhile back. Click on the image for more details as well. They were able to improve efficiency by 15% by redesigning the pump in CAD and leveraging the CFD results to drive the design changes. As consumers, we just expect that the pump will work all the time. Pump manufactures surely have a difficult challenge to package the pump in a small area, make it as efficient as possible, quiet as possible and sell for less than $100. There has to be a streamlined way for designers to gain insight to their designs.

Upfront CAE & Linux: Does a Future Exist?

The Linux OS has been around for about 17 years. It has grown in popularity and functionality, but really still has a "cult" following. Check out the above Wikipedia link for the details on its origin etc. Pretty sure most people reading this have a general feel for what it is about.

I am the first to admit that in the early/mid 90s I was really hooked on the entire idea. I had a standard windows machine and also had a "second" machine to tinker with Linux. I was introduced to it by some computer geek friends. It was intriguing to think that we were all very into the "alternative" way of doing things. Once out of school, I was working with some pretty high end CAE software packages and we were running UNIX/Linux etc, so I continued to tinker. I was always partial to SUSE/Linux (before big, bad Novell bought them) I still have it installed on an old laptop and when I really want to geek it out, I fire that bad boy up.

The fact is Linux is becoming mainstream, but not in the conventional way that you may think. It is being used in mobile phones, kiosks, game systems and a whole slew of other industries. The fact is most people are using Linux everyday and probably are not aware of it. But will it become mainstream and be leveraged by the multi-tasking engineer that is running Upfront CAE tools? The same question can be posed to the engineers that are driving MCAD today? The quick and simple answer is-- probably not anytime soon.

You will certainly have the renegades out there, those that just can't bring themselves to using Windows. Bold move, but power to them. My gut is that Windows is here to stay for awhile. It's known, it's legacy is overwhelming and let's face it - we all know it pretty well. As a user that is, not in an IT kind of way. I am sure you can pitch it from a security standpoint. I am suggesting from strictly a user's perspective and whether or not large organizations would take the plunge.

I think Linux is being adopted by the analysis community and will continue on that trend. But I think the Upfront community is more mainstream, tends to go with the flow (no pun intended) and these guys are typically windows users.

I think it is a toss up which direction the Upfront community will go; Linux or Mac?