Editor’s Pick: Upfront Design Studies Made Easier

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

My editor is expecting me to make a joke about this being German negativity day: 9-9-9. But I have nothing but positives today for a product I’ve found well done for a long time, CFdesign from Blue Ridge Numerics.

Now, a few years back, I described CFdesign as a disruptive technology. The reason I said that was twofold. One, CFdesign is real CFD (computational fluid dynamics) for design engineers who are not expert in CFD but who really know how to use Inventor, Solid Edge, SolidWorks, and the like. CFdesign integrates with your MCAD system, and you use it early and often to engineer more robust designs. This all means far fewer “design to analysis back to design” iterations and compressed time to market. Second, and the real disruptive part, CFdesign represented a new way of doing things that leveraged computers rather than computerizing traditional serial processes. Blue Ridge Numerics just came out with the 2010 version of CFdesign. It’s a fine continuation of that heritage.

Multiple design studies and tools to work with tons of data are what CFdesign 2010 brings to this conversation. This means that you can fiddle with heat and fluid settings, meshes, models, geometries, and what have you in a single environment. Then, you can do comparisons, rummage through and align common data sets, then plot and chart your output, again all from one place. While CFdesign 2010 will not think for you, it will help you produce results that will let you make informed decisions—again, early and often in the design process.

CFdesign 2010 has a bunch of other enhancements and new tools such as direct modeling tools for meshes and volume flows. The online Answer System has been redone with more ways to get answers, self-train, and network. You can check that out in today’s Pick of the Week writeup. While there hit the links to the registration-free videos. Each is about three minutes short. I like the guy who does the presentation. He speaks like a human rather than some FM radio robot.

CFdesign has always been about helping make design engineers and the product development process more efficient through using technology as it should be used. With the introduction of multiple design studies coupled with its heritage of powerful analytical capabilities made accessible to expert MCAD users without CFD expertise, version 2010 takes efficiency to a new level.

Thanks, pal.—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering  Magazine

Read today’s Pick of the Week writeup.