which industry has the best CFD
 

Hi :D,

It's been wondered, which industry has the best CFD engineers/people? Oil & gas, automotive, construction, aerospace, f1, marine, energy, etc?

I'm not sure whether you can say, a CFD engineer from aerospace industry is better than one from oil & gas, one from marine or one from a F1 team.
Somebody running airfoil simulations for 10 years could be surprised about the complexity of a F1 car (I did both, but not for 10 years. What a shame, or should I say fortunately? :D I've got mixed feelings), although both is kind of external aerodynamics. This guy, how good he ever might be, might still have no idea of running a eulerian multiphase flow case or might get overchallenged running a case involving morphed meshes, lot of macro programming, boiling, CHT....

Generally I would say, F1, aerospace industry etc. have a lot of specialized people, outstanding in what they do. Most guys working for an engineering service will not have the same expertise in any of this subjects, but will be more flexible when they get a case they have never seen before. Of course this assumes, engineering service people will not work for the same industry all the time, so it will be only partially right.

CFD can be complex enough for never get boring. Sometimes a newbie will tell an old hand what to do. And even when you've got good expertise and 250 years experience, you will learn something new for sure. That's why I love it. But I don't care who is "better" than anyone else.

(But to finish this post: I'm kind of jealous of some guys from F1 or aerospace for the computational ressources they've got available. I also want to have a cluster with 5000 CPU's....)

kinda brings to what defines best or better or good

My opinion is that the aerospace industry probably has the most capable CFD workforce. My rationale is as follows:
1. Aerospace covers nearly every disciple in CFD (combustion, internal aero, external aero, multiphase, plasmadynamics, etc.)
2. The aerospace industry pushes the bounds of science to achieve the latest and greatest. Not to say that no one else does, I am merely saying that historically, aerospace is at the forefront of fluid dynamics in general.
3. The stuff flies. That in and of itself is awesome.

However, there are very talented folks in every industry using CFD. We all push the bounds to achieve our goals. I am looking forward to hearing about why the other industries may be better than aerospace. :)

swetkyz, of all transportation, I like planes the best. And you're somehow right. But only somehow. There are pretty much examples why a specific industry can have a hard job to do. I think, "best" guys are at some consultant companies. Not due to the extremely complicated physics and the most complex cases. But just 'cause a consultant doing every few weeks something completely different has to be very flexible. There's not much experience one could use from a similar case, but needs to get a good result in a tight time frame with limited resources.

An engineer doing external aero will most likely not do any combustion since engines are developed by different companies. There are not that much moving meshes involved. The time frame for development is not as tight as it is in Formula 1 (it's very stressful there). There are a lot of examples why other industry more deserves the good reputation of the aerospace industry.

But all depends on the definition of "good", "better", "best", "worst" etc.
It does neither make an automotive CFD engineer worse just since an aerospace CFD engineer does his job well since 5 years, nor vice versa.

And not to forget: Even when some guys are in some industry which isn't that famous (who cares about electronic cooling? Just boring :p. The same with food technologies :p...), it might be an important job they're doing - and they have to do it well, I'm sure!

But the most important thing is:

We are all CFD engineers. We are the best and we can rule the world, but we are modest enough not to shout it from the rooftops :D:D:D

In my opinion all the industry and technology are important nowadays for the convenience of human being. I think that the best CFD Engineers (regardless of the area of application) are those who understand deeply: 1- the physics behind the fluid flow, 2- the complicated transport phenomena and the equivalent mathematical interpretations and finally 3- the applied numerical methods.

From what I see - turbomachinery (pumps, turbines, compressors, reaction-propulsion) for multiphase, with vide ranges of pressure and flow rate.

If you can make good CFD simulation with high verification on the real product in turbomachinery - you surely have deep understanding what CFD is.

Software industry.


Especially those project with GPL.

An example would be OpenFOAM and one of its creator: Weller.

H.G. Weller must be the best CFDer so far since he wrote and share such an amazing C++ library for such a long time.