Day in the life of a CFD engineer?
 

When you go to work in the morning do you spend the full day in front of a computer creating simulations?

Do you occasional do a lot of hard mathematics?

What do you find most exiting about the job?

Do you work in R & D? if so, what is it like, what sort of research are you doing?

Can you just basically describe what you do on a daily basis.

That's all I can think of for now, but there will be many more :)

Thank you in advance.

We usually put the simulation on the cluster and then play the network games all day on the big screens. Whenever any one ask about the work, we usually say simulation is in progress wait for couple of hours :p

Day in the life of a CFD engineer?
 

The job breaks down to three tasks:

Push the nodes - Make the plots - Take the heat

That is all

After reading the news :) Seriously though, sometimes you might spend all day working on simulations, but don't forget there is a lot of post-processing to do as well. You aren't doing the simulations just for the sake of doing them, usually there is some kind of useful information you want to extract. Then you probably have to prepare a report or presentation to show your results. This can take a lot of time. In addition, there is those simulations that don't work where you have to do something creative.

I'm in R&D so yes I get involved in lots of mathematics; whether it is "hard" is a matter of personal opinion I guess.

Most exciting is when you encounter and solve a challenging problem, especially when the involves developing new models to do the trick.

Yes. Code development.

Honestly it varies from day-to-day/

Thank you for the helpful replies, really gave me a better insight on what the job actually consists of.

Cdegroot, your reply was especially helpful because you had answered all of my questions, thank you :) you said, you are doing code development, could you please explain what this means? if I wanted to do code development would I be able to do it with a PhD in CFD or would a software engineering qualification be required?

I am sorry if this is a silly question but I am only a college student and am deciding what I would like to study in the future and this is very helpful to me.

Also, if anyone has any more information about there job (any field of CFD) please post your information.

Thank you.

Do not forget that the 10-second firing test can send to the trash yearly work on your CFD code :)

CFD in R&D is only a small part of the process

I'm happy to help! To explain a bit more what I am doing, without breaking any confidentiality rules, I can say that I work at a University but I am consulting with a CFD company quite extensively developing models and writing the code to implement them.

In my experience, if you want to do the coding of physical models (i.e. working on the core CFD code) they will want you to have a PhD focused on CFD; this is what I have. There are also typically many people with a software engineering background on staff as well, but they work more on things like GUIs, coupling different types of solvers together, memory management, solver add-ins, etc. They will focus on the software details and the CFD people will focus on the core solver.

Thank you for the very helpful reply to my question :)