Blue Ridge Numerics Launches CFdesign 2010

By DE Editors

Blue Ridge Numerics, Inc. has announced the availability of CFdesign 2010, a CFD application that provides a CAD-driven design study environment that enables engineers to achieve pass-fail and what-if engineering scenarios as part of a workflow.

“It is increasingly important that companies make simulation an essential part of the product development process,” said Keith Meintjes, research director—CAE,  CPDA: Collaborative Product Development Associates, LLC. “Design engineers need to be able to achieve confidence in the performance of their product designs before committing to a physical prototype, and CFdesign 2010 is a great step in that direction. CFdesign 2010 empowers non-expert CFD end users in the CAD environment with a tool that allows easy evaluation of fluid flow performance with new single and multi-scenario design study capabilities. The new design study environment enables engineers to quickly compare different designs and make assessments of product performance upfront in the design process,  resulting in overall improved product quality and innovation.”

CFdesign 2010 provides an environment to create and manage flow and thermal design studies containing single or multiple scenarios, and a new process for assessing performance comparatively against competing designs, as well as specified critical values. Additionally, design feedback is expressed in standard engineering terms, so engineers can locate critical pieces of information without having to be a CFD expert or dig through mountains of CFD outputs.

“Traditional and embedded CFD products historically have not supported engineering design studies, as they have been built for a single analysis as the engineering objective, making multi-scenario design studies too time intensive,  impractical, and at times impossible. As result, very few companies are getting the business impact they need from a CFD investment,” said Derrek Cooper,  product manager, Blue Ridge Numerics.

CFdesign 2010 features include:

• Flexible design study environment: CFdesign 2010 readily supports one or multiple project-specific objectives, including design qualification (pass-fail),  quality and innovation (what-if).
• Design study manager: Add-in allows multiple designs and scenarios to be created and managed within the MCAD environment.
• Design study bar: A digital prototyping control panel that lets users create, add,  change, and manage multi-scenario design studies.
• Scenario cloning: Create new simulation scenarios with a right-click. Each cloned scenario is an editable lightweight twin of the original, reducing the load on computer memory and graphics.
• Direct modeling of external flow volumes and mesh refinement regions.
• Flexible decision-making environment: assimilates simulation results from multiple scenarios into a unified, interactive product performance picture.
• Critical value engineering: Select or define the project-specific critical performance values and CFdesign will deliver the complete performance picture, comparing against the targeted performance objective and against competing designs.
• Design review center: Select a group of designs or scenarios and add them into a filmstrip viewer. Drag and drop into the design review center for a deep dive into the variables driving design performance.
 

With the release of 2010, CFdesign supports the new iCore7 processor from Intel,  delivering approximately 2.5 more speed than a workstation with an Intel Core2 Quad processor, according to the company. CFdesign 2010 automatically uses up to four cores. Additional cores can be used with the CFdesign HPC Module.

CFdesign 2010 is available as an integrated, associative solution for Autodesk Inventor,  CATIA, CoCreate, NX, Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, and SpaceClaim, and operates on Windows XP 32, XP 64, Vista 32, and Vista 64.

For more information, visit Blue Ridge Numerics.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.