“We are offering an amazingly elegant solution for Pro/ENGINEER users,” says Jim Spann, vice president of Marketing for Blue Ridge Numerics. “This guided tour approach is a nice way to educate the thousands of engineers who face product performance challenges related to fluid flow and heat transfer.”

The CAD industry is (slowly) moving away from software co-existance to file translation to inter-process communication. The article describes the current capabilities and what is needed to make true CAD interoperability a reality.

The new version also has a number of enhancement for simulating rotating machinery and enhanced handling of multiple CPU runs.

Demonstrations of the new version will be available at the 40th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit January 14-17, 2002.

The article covers the basics of solution convergence in a CFD simulation and discusses the level of convergence necessary for differing applications. For instance, a highly converged solution is required if you are examining minute details in the flow field as opposed to a case where you are simply looking for approximate flow features.

During the course of the iterative solution algorithm, the imbalance in each cell is a small, non-zero value that, under normal circumstances, decreases as the solution progresses. This imbalance is called the residual.

In conclusion the article points out that solution convergence is only one part of overall simulation accuracy.

Just hearing the words 'computational fluid dynamics' is usually enough to send shudders down the spines of most product-development engineers. The mention of CFD still tends to conjure up images of stern-looking men in white lab coats conducting experiments in NASA test cells.

The document has seven chapters which address sources of error and provides short simple bullet-point statements of advice following the discussion.

There are also eight example calculations, calculated by the commercial code vendors, which are explained in detail. These test cases range from natural convection in a cavity through to flow in a low speed centrifugal compressor and in an internal combustion engine valve.