CFdesign 2010: The multi-scenario design study environment

The epitome of upfront cfd is leveraging the results from your fluid flow and heat transfer simulation to help drive design. The results need to answer the question whether a design or a scenario passed or failed. The results should also provide some insight to why it passed or failed and should help the design engineer make better design decisions. Everything else, is simply gravy.

We have been obsessed with this idea from the beginning. We have talked to literally 1000s of design engineers and the message we are hearing is that they want an environment that fosters decision making. The workflow needs to be super intuitive and a key is to be able to identify critical values and compare this data very easily.

CFdesign 2010 takes upfront cfd to a new level. The brand new environment has been optimized for multi-scenario design studies. Everything from the setup workflow, to the lightweight architecture that makes multiple scenarios possible all the way to the brand new Decision Center that makes decision making...well, exactly what it should be...simple!

Don't take my word for it, take a look for yourself.

Top 10 reasons why CFdesign 2010 is changing the game...again!

Things have been quiet on the Virtual Engineer front lately. All for good reasons. I have been utterly consumed with the new release, CFdesign 2010. The feedback has been overwhelmingly great.

This release is a game-changer, for sure. You've been asking and we have been listening. Take a peek at the doc below to get a general feel. Videos will be posted in the next few days.

Click the "Toggle full screen" button.

CFdesign 2010_top 10 Brochure

Big Props to Pump Design Engineers

Started my Sunday, pretty typical, hanging with the kids etc. Thunderstorms had kicked in and we had one of the hardest rains in Philly in a very long time. Having a fairly old house by US standards comes with flooding wet basements from time to time. As you can imagine the clean up side of the story was less than fun.

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.