The primary obstacle for the use of CFD in design has been that design engineers are required to perform a variety of tasks - only a small part of which might be analysis.

“So the problem was that these engineers were using these tools every once in a while,” says Ed Williams, president of Blue Ridge Numerics. “You’re trying to teach them all these complicated things that they are going to forget the next time they go to use it a month later.”

Credit for the change is given to the great advancements in grid generation in the past 20 years, along with ease-of-use enhancements by the flow solver vendors. Tighter integration with CAD has also been a big factor in making the tools easier to use. The newest version of Blue Ridge Numerics CFdesign software, for instance, was designed to be tightly integrated with Pro/Engineer from PTC. The software launches directly from within Pro/E and works directly on the Pro/E geometry.