Editor's Pick: Post-Processor Tailored for CFD Users

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

The team at CEI—Computational Engineering International—has been busy. You might recall that back in April I told you about Version 9.0 of EnSight Lite for CAE postprocessing visualization. Now there's another new member of the EnSight family of products, EnSight CFD. CFD (computational fluid dynamics) is considered CAE, you say, so what's the dif? The difference is that EnSight CFD is just for CFD practitioners.

The full EnSight suite, you see, is designed for heavy-duty finite element and CFD postprocessing, visualization, and animation. EnSight Lite, which is anything but a lightweight tool, gives small and mid-sized outfits an application to maximize their postprocessing investment by enabling high-end postprocessing on typical engineering workstations. EnSight CFD takes a similar approach by making full-power CFD postprocessing, visualization, and animation capabilities available to engineers who work with CFD all the time.

EnSight CFD uses the high-end, high-quality graphics and rendering EnSight engine that has made CEI a leader in engineering and scientific postprocessing and visualization software and molds it to fit the way CFD practitioners work so that you can spend more time exploring your data. A key to the way EnSight CFD works is that it makes all sorts of postprocessing and visualization functionality accessible to you from your mouse—essentially, you can postprocess and visualize a model with just your mouse. Right-click on your mouse and you get context-sensitive menus from which you can select variables to play, create graphs and iso-surfaces, edit properties, enter text, move, and control different entities on your screen, and so forth. Left-click on a button and start recording an animation.

Because it is a part if the EnSight suite, EnSight CFD has readers that detect files from major analysis packages such as FLUENT and CFX automatically—it supports something like 50 solvers and data formats. CEI has enhanced these readers’ CFD capabilities. Example: they automatically add a series of derived variables based on explicit dataset files, which means that you do not have to manually create quantities like radial velocity, pressure gradient, mach number, and what have you. EnSight CFD also has a calculator so that you can quickly calculate frequently used formulas like mass flow average, mass flow rates, and min/max values.

The short of it is that EnSight CFD is designed so that you can do what you need to do quickly and easily without having to focus on taming your software to do what you want it to do. That's why I recommend that you read more about EnSight CFD from today's pick of the Week write-up then go and check out the links to the registration-free videos. You can also sign-up for a trial version while you're there.

Thanks, pal. -- Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering Magazine

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