Check it Out: the "ROI of Concurrent Design with CFD" On-Demand Webinar

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Old familiar ways linger at many engineering outfits. Change is often blocked by well-placed egos, guarding their expertise, aligned with the money watchers inherently skeptical that new stuff will have a positive return on investment (ROI). This is why today’s Check it Out on-demand webinar is important to design engineers, defenders of the old sod, and CFOs. It offers hard-to-refute data indicating that concurrent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can return a positive ROI.

Sponsored by Mentor Graphics, “ROI of Concurrent Design with CFD” is a 45-minute broadcast with two distinct parts. The first part features the Aberdeen Group’s Michelle Boucher—whose work I know and can vouch for—discussing research into how engineering firms leverage CFD in today’s environment where development schedules are shorter, projects understaffed, and product complexity increasing.

Aberdeen surveyed companies confronting CFD engineering challenges. Companies where design engineers used CFD were more likely to meet their quality, revenue, and development cost targets by wide margins. Reasons cited include the ability to make better trade-off decisions, which leads to more opportunity to innovate. Innovation, of course, leads to better differentiated products, which can lead to increased revenues.

But that’s not all there is to it. The survey results show the widest efficiency gap is meeting product launch dates. Companies with design engineers using CFD are 21% more likely to hit their launches. Why? Because early CFD brings predictability to the development process and provides design engineers with greater insight into the product under development, making decision-making more efficient and enabling problems to be found and fixed sooner.

The webinar’s second half is a discussion of Mentor Graphics and its CAD-embedded, concurrent CFD tools called FloEFD. Hosted by senior applications engineer Chris Watson, of particular interest here is the comparison of conventional, upfront, and concurrent CFD beginning at slide 18. On a conceptual level, think of concurrent CFD as the next generation of upfront CFD for major CAD applications like Solid Edge, NX, Inventor, Creo, and CATIA. One thing the technology does is eliminate or automate many of the steps used in earlier-generation upfront technologies. It also offers high-level analyses with a “built for design engineers” approach. Both characteristics can enhance efficiency.

Efficiency, of course, is the name of the game. There’s a ton of data for design engineers and engineering management to reap in this presentation. At the end, there’s a link to download the Aberdeen report. The “ROI of Concurrent Design with CFD” webinar provides an efficient, well-done presentation on why concurrent CFD is well worth your time investigating further.

Thanks, Pal.” Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Watch the “ROI of Concurrent Design with CFD” On-Demand Webinar.