Flomerics Joins NAFEMS CFD Working Group

By DE Editors

To help promote best practice in the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) during the design phase, Flomerics (Marlborough, MA) has joined the NAFEMS CFD Working Group (Glasgow, Scotland). Founded in 1995, the group provides guidance and information for the safe and reliable use of CFD within the engineering community.

CFD was once the preserve of academics and specialists within large organizations. Despite the dramatic increase in computing power and improved ease-of-use in recent years, only about 3 percent of more than 1 million mechanical design engineers worldwide are currently using CFD.

One reason CFD finds limited use in product design is the effort required to clean up CAD geometry and construct the mesh prior to the analysis — something that must be repeated every time the design is changed. See an example (to the right), where a velocity cut-plot shows the analysis results on an aircraft optical turret as obtained by EFD.Lab, Flomerics’ CAD-embedded CFD software.

EFD is based on the same mathematical foundation as traditional CFD software, but Flomerics’ CAD-to-CFD technology allows EFD to detect and mesh fluid regions automatically, so the CAD geometry is used as is. Unlike traditional CFD, EFD is embedded in the user’s CAD system, so mechanical engineers can simulate fluid flow and heat transfer without leaving the MCAD software they are familiar with.

With SolidWorks now supplying Flomerics’ FloXpress to all SolidWorks 2008 customers, tools like EFD are poised to make CFD far more widely accessible.

For details, go to Flomerics or to NAFEMS.

For additional coverage on NAFEMS, see p. 20, DE, January 2008.

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