User-Friendliness
 

We all use the term user-friendliness when talking about commercial codes. I think it means differnt thing to different users. What does it mean to you? What would have to be in the code before you would label it as user friendly?

Re: User-Friendliness
 

here's what i want in a commercial code: (1)to be able to take my geometry (cleaned up of course) from the cad to cfd code in native form (not iges) (2)be able to apply a wide range of different types of boundary conditions preferably to the geomtry (3)be able to model without user coding a wide variety of mechanical possibilities such as bodies in relative motion (4)generate a wide variety of different types of meshes: structured, cartesian, overset, triangular, mixed, moving etc. ability to use adaptive meshing with most if not all types of grid. (5)have a good selection of quality flux schemes (ie i don't want to have one available that i won't ever use because it's always inferior to others) (6)have a good selection of quality turbulence models (this is an oxymoron i know) (7)have access to acceleration schemes especially multigrid (8)be able to obtain many different types of output quatities in different formats. perform operations on output data like line and surface integration (9)integrate easily with popular cae programs for heat transfer and structural analysis (10)optional: ability to perform inverse design and optimisation, evaluate design sensitivities or easily interface with such programs. (11) have a good desktop reference manual backed up by a nice thick users manual that explains theory and not just how to use the code. good online help and free customer support (12)be cheap.(that's my favourite kind of user friendliness) (13)last but not least have a sensible user interface.