Anybody could give me an order of magnitude of the number of poeple using CFD in the world ? Is it several hundred thousand, about a million, or several million ? Thanks for the answer !

I can give you a bound:

between 1 and ~7billion people use CFD

well hope someone is gonna be less funny and can provide some kind of an information ... Thanks

roughly ~2billion are illiterate and there are some who are litterate but do not work (house wives and elderly etc). So the safer bound will be 1 and ~4 billion. We are narrowing down.

Seriously, i dont think my question requires such "low key" comments.

Its very difficult to estimate , you can perhaps estimate the people currently studying in colleges and then say fraction of them study mech and fraction of them work in CFD. Even after that what about those who have completed their study and are working (for them you have to estimate how may companies are working in CFD field and their strength). But the main thing is who will do this much math, i am already math-illetrate.

So ~7billion - illiterate - literate(but dont want to iterate) = iterate?

RoM

It is interesting.I would guess round 1 billion.

Yeh, I could.

I would guess that somewhere between 10^3 and 10^4 use commercial codes in industry.

Steve wrote:

I would guess that somewhere between 10^3 and 10^4 use commercial codes in industry.

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diaw:

That is probably a reasonable estimate of the actual CFD practitioners.

I would suggest that the number of researchers worldwide could probably add another 2-4000 to that list.

diaw...

let's say 1000 licenses per big CFD software company each license has 5 user

1000*5=5000

there are about 5 generally used CFD codes 5000*5=25000

+ some other software codes and own codes users,(20%) 25000+ 25000*20%=30000

If we count the university student who got the CFD education, then (30%)

30000+ 30000*30%=39000=3.9e+4

I do not know it is converged or not, what's your opinion?

Thanks, this confirm my inital guess I am gonna round up to an order of magnitude of several 100 thousand so i am gonna go with there. Thanks to the one who provide usefull information ... for the rest i am glad you had time to lose. Thanks again

In http://www.cfd-online.com/About : "Today CFD Online is the largest and most popular CFD site on the Internet. During a typical week CFD Online is visited by 10,500 people (unique IP addresses) ... (figures from 2004)."

Yep, that is over one week. Over a year the number is > 100,000 unique IP addresses visiting CFD Online. I'd guess that the number of CFD students, engineers and scientists in the world is around 100,000 or even more.

there is a large percentage of people who do not visit cfd-online and work with cfd, for example i know around 10 people with my company that work with cfd and do not visit cfd online. (apart from me only one other guy occasionally visits cfd-online). So that makes the actual number much higher.

Yea, I agree, but all those unique visitors are not necessarily frequent users of CFD Online. Over a whole year it is quite likely that a CFD engineer at least once will stumble over a page at CFD Online when googling or whatever even if he is not aware of CFD Online and visits it frequently.

There is also another thing which affects this number - some people who use dial-up etc. have a dynamic IP number allocation. This means that they will often get a new IP number (out of a pool of available numbers) each time they log in. Then they would be counted as more than one unique user. On the other hand many large companies have a common web-proxy so that all employees who visit CFD Online will appear as on IP address and count as only one uniqe visitors. For large companies, like Volvo, Boeing, GM, Ford, ... this can skew the visitor count significantly. Counting actual real uniqe persons is difficult.

I prefer to look at the weekly figure (about 15,000 unique IP addresses per week). I think that is quite representative for the number of people who are using CFD Online regularly. And I agree with you that there might be a factor of 5 or 10 more CFD engineers who do not visit CFD Online every week.

This is very true, certainly I log on from home and at work and at work we have a proxy so I guess that distorts the numbers a bit.

I checked the stats again and it seems as if my memory of 100,000 unique visitors was an old figure for a 6-month period. Sorry about that. In 2004 CFD Online was visited by 297,801 unique IP addresses.

What kind of idiot asks this question?