What do you do when an overwhelming number of your customers and potential customers are shouting out for improvements to the visualization capabilities of your CFD tool kit? If you’re Flow Science Inc., which delivers free-surface CFD modeling capabilities for industrial and scientific applications, you strike a partnership with a company that specializes in that arena.
Flow Science, known for its Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) analysis capabilities for examining dynamic liquid and gas behavior for the metal casting, civil hydraulics, and microfluidics markets, was strong on the solver and number crunching side. But it perceived a gap in what it could offer its users in terms of showcasing those numerical results in a meaningful, graphics-based way that makes the data more accessible to non-CFD analysts and experts.
Flow Science plans to integrate CEI’s EnSight CFD software directly into its CFD modeling and analysis suite for improved 3D visualization.
”Our customers love our solver and its accurate results, but they said it was difficult to get the kind of animations they wanted,” Tom Jensen, Flow Science president told us. “People’s expectation of how things ought to look, and how they ought to be able to communicate CFD results has gotten higher and higher, to the point that what we do, which has sufficed in the past, was no longer enough. We needed to make some kind of move.”
In this case, the move was to partner with a company that specializes in CFD visualization software as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel on its own, or buy a company outright. Flow Science’s partner of choice is CEI Inc., which markets the EnSight CFD 3D visualization tool. By integrating the latest release, EnSight 10, directly into FLOW-3D, users will gain easy access to high-end, post-processing, and visualization capabilities beyond the basic options currently included in FLOW-3D.
What EnSight can do to enhance the CFD equation can be likened to what consumers now expect to see when gaming. Much as today’s online games are all about hardcore realism, including textures and life-like facial expressions, EnSight brings a higher level of realism to the CFD simulations, according to Darin McKinnis, CEI’s vice president of sales and marketing.
It is interesting to see situations like this. All enterprise software vendors are now touting the heightened user expectations driven by consumer devices such as the iPhone. This is another, very interesting example, of an engineering code driven by the success of gaming programs. Whether they are run on a decicated console or a PC with a high end graphics card, games have come to reply on complex physics processing to get the realism that people have come to expect. This is another interesting cross-over inflexion point in that whole evolution.
Naperlou: I think you are referring to the whole trend around the "consumerization of IT" or consumer-led devices and software driving the kinds of capabilities and functionality business users (in this case, engineers) expect to see in their work tools today.
I have to agree with you on that front. In this particular example, it seems like the Flow Science technology almost offers a cross between gaming and Google Earth-type functionality, providing that realism and in-context perspective consumers are so accustomed to to CFD simulation.
Beth: Would these visual capabilities benefit an aerodynamics engineer who's employing CFD to study the stresses on an airplane wing or fuselage? Or do they already have those kinds of capabilities in their CFD programs?
Beth, your article hits an important point – the blend between accuracy of simulation, ease-of-use and quality of graphics.Enabling more realistic graphics has long been the rallying-cry for the gaming Industry, but has often been a less important driver in engineering graphics.But how much more important are accurate graphics in an engineering simulation compared to a game-?To me, accurate graphical representation is not only important for clarity during layout & design but also absolutely essential in the analysis results. Outputs are sharpened and honed with improved graphics.The design engineer can visually see results-anomalies they otherwise may have over-looked.
I think that same level of realism is really coming into play for engineering applications now thanks to a lot of the inroads made by photorealistic games. Seeing the CFD results of a air flow or water flow within the context of a realistic-looking product and against the backdrop of the environment the product lives in really changes the game and makes simulation not only more compelling, but better suited for identifying design flaws that non-CFD experts can actually understand.
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