Dear all please advice which is better in the long term money wise cfd application engineer or cfd code developer

please dont say it depends on personal choice

what is the demand ratio of industry thanks in advance

I would think being a developer requires higher degrees (masters/PhD) and a deeper level of understanding, both of which in my opinion would command a higher salary.

Just my 2 cents....

I agree with pc, but that's only wishful thinking. Salary does not scale with expertise.

Besides, the question should not just be how much money you make once you got a job. First you have to consider the likelyhood of getting a job! The difference between application and development is that the industry demand for CFD application is ongoing (and even growing) by nature (finishing one design does not mean you can do the next one without CFD). Development, on the other hand is slowing down rapidly as the field matures (and it already is very mature compared to a couple of decades ago). There is always a niche to be filled, and the prospect of a spike in development due to a CFD revolution brought on by some unexpected breakthrough (understanding turbulence?). I would guess that most CFD developers have decided to go that way for pure scientific curiosity and interest, not so much for the money. If you want something financially more secure you have to choose application over development.

I would agree with Mani that there are probably more opportunities in applications vs. development.

money in CFD !!!

thankyou mani for your valuable input but i want to get clarification about:: is there nothing left to explore in cfd other than turbulence!!!!

of course, there is... turbulence is just one example that came to mind, and possibly the most challenging topic. it's actually a fluid dynamics problem... not just a CFD problem.

there are still many researchers out there, each of whom can give you a couple of ideas, namely the problems they are working on. as far as I see it there are some relatively old questions in CFD that haven't been properly addressed.

for example: what's the most efficient and accurate way to compute flows over a large range of Mach numbers (low and moderately high Mach). do we use a pressure based or density based method, or some combination. what does that combination look like. much work has been done, but it doesn't feel like there has been a definite conclusion on which (combination of) equations to use in which unified way. instead, the incompressible and compressible CFD communities seem estranged from each other.

Again, this is only one example, don't take it as the most important one. i'm sure you'll get some more ideas from each researcher you'll talk to. In principle, there is a wealth of complexity in each of the following questions in CFD that haven't been (and may never be) completely answered. they are not independent of each other, but for each type of flow there are usually many possible combinations of

-- which governing equations to choose

-- which discretization method to choose (e.g. grids, gridless)

-- if grids are used: which type of grid topology to choose, and which method for grid generation

-- which scheme to use to discretize the equations

-- which boundary conditions to apply (very important yet underrated aspect!)

-- which iteration method to use to advance the discretized equations

-- how to judge convergence (seemingly simple but still causes a great deal of confusion)

-- how to postprocess the data (visualization, averaging techniques) (yes, this is a part of CFD!)

The list is as incomplete as any such list will be. One more thing: There are various still somewhat separated scientific fields: fluid dynamics, structure dynamics, heat transfer, combustion, control, optimization a.s.o. Computational techniqes have been developed for each of these fields. As they become more mature almost independently, researcher also start to combine them, and those interdisciplinary topics are still pretty hot. In a previous post I suggested to look at fluid-structure optimization: Given an airfoil that can oscillate (heaving and rotating), can you devise a computational method to obtain the ratio of heaving and rotation amplitudes, the ratio of heaving and rotation frequencies and the phase between those two motions, for the maximum thrust in a given flow?