From "Hero Mountain" to "Payback Meadow"

Dennis Nagy, CD-adapco

If you are starting to read this article, you obviously have an interest in CFD and flow simulation. But the real question is: why? CFD has been around for decades and has made great progress in the speed and accuracy with which meaningful answers to real problems can be obtained. The key word here is “meaningful.” The old maxim “the purpose of computing is insight, not numbers” applies here, too. We do CFD in order to understand better thermal/flow-related behavior of products and processes being designed for commercial (read: money-making) purposes. Industry has also come to realize that design (product creation) drives overall product lifecycle costs, profit, and ultimately shareholder value to a much greater extent than the actual cost of the engineering development itself (i.e. a highly leveraged activity).

The better understanding gained through CFD should facilitate better (in the business pay-back sense) development decisions. For that to be the case with any kind of CAE simulation (of which CFD is becoming a more and more significant part), seven challenges need
to be overcome (shown in Figure 1 in the historical order in which they have been encountered over the past decades).

For a number of reasons, CFD has historically lagged structural finite element analysis (FEA) and multibody dynamic analyses (MBD). But all forms of simulation have made enough progress to reveal to industrial management the time- and cost-saving potential of Virtual
Product Development (VPD). Computer modeling and simulation can now be used to eliminate many costly physical prototypes
(providing in some cases insight not observable from physical tests), shorten the development portion of the product lifecycle, and thus allow time for many more “what-if” examinations of design alternatives, looking further “outside the box” for really innovative product ideas.

This business payback is possible only if we all realize when, where, and how to apply CFD for greatest impact. This is where “hero
mountain” and “payback meadow” come in (in case you were still wondering what that strange title meant). In my long career in the
CAE software vendor industry, I have observed a situation characterized by the simplified pictorial graph in Figure 2. Basically, the business impact of solving simulation problems in industry is not proportional to the technical difficulty of those problems. There is, instead, a collection of difficult problems of lesser overall business impact (pathological situations or “grand challenges”) that most R&D groups (and software vendors) have focussed on solving as an “entrance test” for the acceptance of a simulation technology such as CFD into mainstream product development processes. This “Hero Mountain,” which many simulation software vendors are climbing (forced by many companies’ R&D expert “gatekeepers” to climb?), obscures the presence of a much larger number of somewhat easier development problems that occur more often and, if solved regularly and in a timely manner, could have much greater overall (collective) impact.

If integrated, easy-to-use software simulation tools were regularly applied to these problems as part of a company’s established product development workflow, it would actually lead to broader continuous design improvement and realization of this greaterbusiness benefit (“Payback Meadow”). HP, among other astute companies, realized this phenomenon and created specific technologist positions within their product line organizations. These “ Gardeners” had the assignment to find promising technologies and cultivate them for practical use in product development line organizations, as a counter-influence to the centralized R&D groups occupying the “Hero Mountains.”

Bringing this realization back home to our CFD topic, it means that CFD has a wide range of business usefulness across the whole
spectrum of problem difficulties actually encountered in industry, as long as the tools are appropriately tailored to the various purposes:

• For quick examination of many more ideas early on in development, design engineers who are not “CFD gurus” need easy-to-use tools intimately linked to their conceptual design tools such as 3D CAD and solid modeling. This is often their first encounter with CFD, their “front door” to applying more advanced CFD more often, as their experience and problem challenges grow. CD-adapco provides the STAR-CAD Series to meet this entry-level “quick-study” need (where timely
  observations of trends are more insightful than precise answers), right within the most popular 3D modeling environments.
  
• As development detail evolves, the degree of accuracy needed in the simulations also increases, but these situations are still
  expected as a regular part of complex technical product/process development. Here, simulation-oriented engineers need specialized tools customized to their particular repetitive workflow. CD-adapco’s es-solutions are developed to fill this need and we expect to see a dramatic increase in our development of vertical application-specific templates and application suites. Models developed, and experienced gained, in the early-stage use of the STAR-CAD Series can be migrated into this phase of product development without any loss of time or information.
  
• And, of course, Hero Mountain is always there. Specialists will always be called upon to tackle the toughest CFD simulation
  problems, where the combination of complex physics and complex geometry push the limits of available technology, either
  in the validation or trouble-shooting stages of the product development cycle. CD-adapco’s powerful range of solvers and
  advanced meshing tools, and our large, highly-experienced consulting services staff, are well-recognized for being able to
  meet any challenge on Hero Mountain, again without loss of experience or information obtained by the development engineers using compatible CFD tools from CD-adapco.

In short, CD-adapco is the leading provider of the full spectrum of relevant CFD software and experience that any global enterprise can integrate into their VPD processes for dramatic business payback improvement.