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

… Read the rest “From post-processing and visualization to simulation result exploration”

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Predicting the future of CFD is similar to weather forecasting, maybe just like Mayan’s Apocalypse.

But this does not stop us from expecting a new prediction, just like you check the weather forecast before travel.

As my first degree is meteorology related, please do not expect the prediction is more accurate than weather forecasting for the next 365 days.

#1. Automated meshing:  a classical fairy tale continues

Fairy tales always have listeners, and of course, tellers as well. When you are young, you are listeners; when you are older, you may gradually become a teller.  What has not been changed is the story.

Automated meshing is such a classic fairy tale in CFD industry.

Meshing is always one of the most challenging tasks for most real-world CFD problems (I am not talking about flow over an infinite plate). Automated mesh generation is the dream … Read the rest “CFD in 2013: what will change? what will not”

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We are frustrated with the numerous CAD/CAM/CAE/PLM/PDM magazines, which have articles similar to marketing materials: lack of depth. Such articles may mislead the CAE professionals, although they provide the updates on the industry.

We are also frustrated with the market research reports produced by some research firms. Unfortunately, a lot of these researchers even  cannot ask a proper question, and therefore cannot present a clear picture of the industry, because they do not have any knowledge on CAE.

So, here comes CAE Watch.

We will give you in-depth analysis on the CAE  industry and share with you the advanced techniques in both FEA and CFD. In addition, you can ask any CAE related questions: FEA, CFD, PLM, HPC, preprocessing, post-processing, meshing, CAD import…, and our experts will try to give you the most relevant and accurate answer.

Not enough?

 … Read the rest “CAEWatch, WTF?”

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It seems most CFD software vendors now are aware of the importance of post-processing capabilities. Competition for buyers will be extended from brains to eyeballs. If your CFD software can only draw black and white lines, or can only generate mediocre animations, it seems it will prepare to die, soon.

The trend of getting better visualization and post-processing tools is surely driven by the demands from the customer, although “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

So, if you ask so many called CFDers (CFD engineers, CFD specialist, CFD analysts,  CAE engineers…) why they think visualization is so important. You probably will get all sorts of answers. But probably, the top 3 answers would be:

#1. “My boss can only read colourful things.”

The sad truth is that most of the times the supervisors of the CFDers don’t know CFD (why should they know?). Images … Read the rest “The best 3 answers to “Why is visulization important for CFD?””

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