We all know post-processing because it is part of CAE.
All textbooks teach you how important the post-processing is. For most Generation Y engineers, post-processing (and maybe even the whole CAE) almost equal to visualization as discussed in this post.
Yes, post-processing is important: it gives you the chance to justify your one-month (or one-day, or one-week, or one-year) work; it shows you something you want or something unexpected.
If you are lucky, you can even show how your simulation matches the experimental results. If you don’t have any experimental data (unfortunately, nowadays, this is not uncommon any more), you can still justify your results against common sense.
Of course, “right” or “accurate” results are not the goal of simulation. The purposes of simulation usually include:
- to get some data or insights that are impossible, or impractical, or too expensive, from experiments or physical tests (so that the process or system or physics can be better understood; for PhD students, more colorful figures in papers and thesis) ;
- to diagnose the problems encountered of a system (or a component) in real-world operation (so that the possible causes or scapegoats can be identified);
- to predicate the performance of a system