Comparison between Fluent and Autodesk CFD
 

Hi Guys,

I am working on CFD tool hunting for my company. Now I have two candidates: Fluent and Autodesk CFD. Of course money talks, Fluent is much more expensive than Autodesk CFD. But I need some information about their accuracy, ease of use etc. Could anyone here having experience with either of these two give me some hints? We need the tool for wind turbine rotor design and optimization.

Many thanks!

I have used Fluent but not Autodesk CFD. In purchasing the software, I am not sure if you can license Fluent standalone, but are required to purchase and general ANSYS license. In any case, Fluent/ANSYS are quite robust, easy to use, and the documentation is extensive. As a matter of fact, ANSYS Fluent has its own forum on this site, which is indicative of its pervasive use in academia and industry. This software should be able to handle the wind turbine design problem you speak of.

Regarding Autodesk CFD, if it is anything like Solidworks flow simulation, I would not purchase it. Solidworks flow simulation does too much "behind the scenes" and automated so you can get "a solution" whether or not it is a "good solution". With ANSYS Fluent or any dedicated CFD software, you have much more control.

I am no expert but wind turbine rotor design and optimization sounds like a very serious job so I guess I would go with the fluent. I mean fluent is better than autodesk cfd (for example you don't have hex mesh, only tetrahedrons in autdesk), but it requires much much more skilled staff. I guess you need to determine if autodesk will do the job, so if i were you i would ask the distributor if they did any experimental comparison of their results in similar case and if they know if anybody did a job like that and i would definitely like to see the report, rather than hear "results were ok".
Man, I would maybe even ask them to do a simulation representing the one you guys will do and check how results align with data (to have relevant data the case they do should be very popular like airfol, subsonic-supersonic nozzle flow problems etc.).
I'm pretty sure you don't get to choose turbulence models in autodesk, so i wouldn't be surprised if cfd engineers from here would diqualify autodesk for that, but hey it is an optimization problem - fluent costs more, requires more input (skills and time) from user and is used for stuff like that, autodesk is cheaper, user friendly but you don't know if you can trust it. You can also check out ansys cfx, there is also helyx engys.

I agree most of the comments above, but just be fair Autodesk CFD does have option to choose turbulence model.

I haven't used Autodesk CFD but used its predecessor CFdesign in my previous job. It had really crappy solver and mesher, though very user friendly interface. Don't believe Autodesk has improved the solver and the mesher, so it is most probably still crappy in terms of the reliability and accuracy. I remember running the same model with different versions of CFDesign and getting quite different results, rarely aligning with reality. For the last 15 years I've been using Flowsimulation and scStream and found those to be much more reliable and trustful (and less expensive).