Mentor Blogs

Flow field around an F1 car. Image courtesy of Voxdale. For the past few days, I’ve been on the road. Flying to the States is always an adventure … especially during late fall. Air turbulence isn’t much fun – somehow the flight always gets the bumpiest when they serve drinks/food. Go figure. Anyway, during this last flight, I sat next to the window. The flight from San Francisco to Portland was perfectly … Read More

Design Engineer, Flow Field, CFD, Fluid Flow

During my lunch break yesterday I decided to clean my filing box – you know … that dusty tray that sits on most people’s desks and seems to become the repository of papers that you intend to file away but quite don’t know where to put them. Anyway, as I was reading them (so I can figure out where they should go), I came across a news clipping that at first made me chuckle and then made me realize that … Read More

Valve, FloEFD, Fluid Flow, CFD, Pressure Drop, Trial Version, Optimize, Physical Prototype

Firstly I must apologize for the title… I’m afraid it sounds like one of those dodgy emails we all get from spammers but it was the best way of summarizing what I was going to write about today. Whenever I speak with mechanical engineers about why they use simulation, regardless of what they design or where they are from, they always say the same thing (and in no particular order): Reduce prototyping … Read More

Physical Prototype, Fluid Flow, Engineer

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clark I’ve often called mechanical engineers magicians because whenever I listen to them speak about what they do the only thing that comes to mind is magic. Much like the first time I looked at Engineering Fluid Dynamics (EFD). EFD is a different breed of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. EFD shares the same … Read More

Seamless Integration, Rectangular Adaptive Mesh, Transitional, Fluid Flow, Fluid Dynamics, CFD, Turbulent, Convergence, Laminar, What-If, EFD, Cloning

Cuba Gooding Jr’s conversation with Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuire became the mantra of a whole generation. Show _me_ the money. Your manager no doubt says the same thing to you all the time but in different guises: Can we improve product performance/functionality? Can we reduce the cost of producing this product? Can we cut the budget without sacrificing quality? And let’s not forget … Read More

Improve Quality, Improve Functionality, Reduce Cost, FloEFD, Fluid Flow, CFD, Shortened Time to Market, Design Engineer, Fluid Dynamics

I recently read an excellent white paper from Cyon Research titled “Classes of MCAE Software: Clarifying the Market”.   It spoke about the requirement in the industry and the characteristics for CFD software packages that were targeted for use by the CFD specialist.  It also emphasized that the emerging need was for CFD software that could be used by the design engineer who was not a CFD specialist. … Read More

EFD, CAE, Computational Fluid Dynamics, FloEFD, CFD, MCAD, Mechanical Analysis, Fluid Flow, Heat Transfer

As a child I loved watching SciFi shows on TV – the older the reruns the better. Nothing was impossible or too fantastic. And as an adult, I find that I can’t exactly resist watching a few minutes of the old shows much to my husband’s dismay – hey, if I have to watch Jeremy Clarkson babble away on Top Gear then he should be able to sit thru 5 minutes of 1999 if nothing but for chuckle-value. So what … Read More

Fluid Flow, CFD, Visualization, Telecom, Thermal

A while ago I heard something that made me tilt my head to the side… similar to that iconic image of Nipper, the Jack Russell terrier, listening to his master’s voice on a phonograph (I was going to post the image but international copyright rules are rather complicated. If you really want to see the image, then please go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipper). Anyway, someone jokingly referred to … Read More

Fluid Flow, Design Engineer, CFD, ROI, FEA, Fluid Dynamics

We are all familiar with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).  Some of YOU are experts in this science/art and use it on a daily basis to solve some of your most complex fluid flow and heat transfer problems.  Some of US can hardly spell CFD and as engineers design their products they depend heavily on the CFD specialists to perform the simulations that determine if what they are designing will work … Read More

Mechanical Design, Mechanical Analysis, Computational Fluid Dynamics, FloEFD, CFD, MCAD, MCAE, Fluid Flow, Heat Transfer