Automotive Design and Production has posted an article about recent improvements to CFD software and their effects on design engineering.
For years, CFD vendors have taken the geometry from computer-aided design (CAD) to build the CFD model for analysis. But, says Thomas Marinaccio, director of CFD Consulting Services for software vendor CD adapco Group in Melville, NY, it’s been a one-way transfer. “It’s dead,” he says, meaning the designer can’t modify the geometry once it’s inside CFD.
Funny, all the CFD vendors say their products are integrated to CAD. “That can mean several things,” explains Judd Kaiser, technical solutions specialist for fluids and meshing at Ansys Canada Ltd (Waterloo, Ont., Canada). Does it provide good data transfer? Does it provide a clean translation of the CAD geometry to the CFD meshing environment? Does the parametric model automatically update when the CFD mesh updates? Does the integration truly provide two-way connectivity? That is, once an optimum solution is understood in CFD, can the designer push changes back into the CAD system?
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