CFD Online Discussion Forums - CFD Design...The CFD Future

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Originally Posted by John C. Chien
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(1). Other than publishing CFD papers on technical journals and study the fluid dynamics phenomenon, the current useage and vision of CFD is rather vague. (2). Will the use of commercial CFD codes become the main activity of the CFD in the future? So, you have many CFD technicians running various CFD codes trying to get converged results. Is this the future of CFD? (3). Without going into the detailes of the future of CFD in academic institutions and in consulting business, one really must ask the basic question of : " Is CFD really useful? And if so, How do you make it useful. " (4). This question is for persons outside the academic institutions and the technical consulting business. Because for the persons inside the academic institutions, the main goal is to publish new results. The usefulness of the paper is never asked. This is because, the contents of the paper could become very useful in the future. For the persons in the technical consulting business, the need is straight forward, that is to crank out numbers for the customer and get paid by hours. The working environment is ready along with the computers and the softwares. What is required is the experience in using the software. There are various reasons why such jobs exist. In reality, persons working in this environment do not care. (5). After having covered these two areas, we now come to the question of usefulness of the CFD. And this is the future of CFD, I think. (6). This is really a strange question though, because our environment is fluid (air, water, and gas ). From the steam locomotive, power plant, the car, the airplanes, the water pumps, the electirc fans, the air conditioners, the gas stoves,....etc.....to the warfare such as fighters, bombers, rocket, missiles, launch vehicles and even the satellites, all requires the use of fluid dynamics and aerodynamics. (7). So, looking from all of these products and ask a question about the future of the modern CFD is somewhat hard to understand. What's wrong with the current state of CFD? (8). If we look a little deeper into the design processes (or the invention processes) of these products, we can easily find the use of fluid dynamics everywhere. And I would say that in many cases, these processes are computerized. I mean computer codes have been developed to solve the design problem of these products. Yet, from the current understanding of the CFD they are somehow outside the range of CFD or at best near the boarder line. (9). So, without going further into the detailes, I think, the future of CFD lies in its ability to acquire the "DESIGN" quality and produce the products directly. I think, this missing part of the puzzle (the DESIGN QUALITY) will be the key issue in the future time. You can't sell a very elegant numerical mesh to a customer, but a pump with higher efficiency using such mesh in the CFD design will be welcomed by the customer and the national power planners. (10). The whole world is waiting for you, but first, you must turn the CFD recipes into a better working product through the CFD DESIGN. How to achieve that goal, perhaps is a very important issue for the persons inside the academic institutions, the consulting business, and the rest of us. What do you think?

This is how I am facing in my working environment right now. Actually, every business is aiming to get profit in terms of mainly, money. If the work done cannot be achieved with respect to the investment of time and money, it's nothing. Of course, CFD is achieving its reputation in the academic and research field, but the question is that whether it is reliably available for the business industry.

Most of the production team in the industry want to get the CFD result just with a click on the keyboard and their main interest is whether CFD result is matched with experiment or not. They don't care how much you afford to get one solution and how much you consume the time. The other problem of CFD is the requirement of users experience. CFD depends so much on the user ability that prevent many technician of different field to try CFD.