Written by Sandip Jadhav
Wednesday, November 04, 2015
simulationHub - New fluid flow CFD simulation app for designers
By
Sandip Jadhav
Journey of CFD technology from a research lab to an essential tool for every engineering company has been tremendous. Once
upon a time, doing CFD analysis meant first start learning programming, numerical methods and many other things. Today
CFD has crossed those initial barriers. But has CFD become part every engineer? Is it really easy to use? Is it easily
accessible or affordable? Unfortunately, answer is NO.
Take an alternative example of a calculator, today billions of people use it in their daily life. Very few users know how
exactly calculator do certain scientific functions such as roots, logarithms and trigonometry. Just 40 years back when
there was no digital calculator, number crunching was done using Slide Ruler.
My father, an engineering graduate of 1964, shown me how they performed a complex calculation using Slide Ruler. It was
awfully difficult process and it only increases my respect for past generation of engineers.
Our generation of engineers was fortunate to have a digital calculator which gave us just the result we want, without learning time-consuming complex process. This allowed us to focus on our main task that is innovation, design and engineering.
Google has now made scientific calculator even simpler. You just search an equation and google gives you the answer. That means now you can access scientific calculator anytime and from anywhere. This example of calculator generations shows us the user�s need of simple to use and easily available things he required to achieve his goal.
Similar is the case of CFD simulation. Today designer needs a new software which gives him quick and accurate results without following a complex process. Designer wants to use CFD to improvise his design of a thermal fluid equipment. But he does not want to go into complexities of cad repair, meshing process, solver method and schemes, HPC and many other such unrelated jargon. Today, if any small thermal fluid equipment maker thinks of using CFD in his product development process, he need to allocate the funds for training team of engineers on CFD application, buying set of CFD software and buying set of HPC hardware. This turns out to be a lot of investment and hence they ditch the CFD, use Excel and rely on their experience.
CCTech as an organization has been grappling over this problem over past 10 years. First, we tried to address a problem of learning CFD by creating LearnCAx, a FREE CFD learning platform. Still this did not solve the problem of CFD making available to every engineer. Then from last few years, we started to work on designing CFD software which mainly has following characteristics:
- Very easy to use � Today�s new generation does not want to spend months on learning the software. They want every software to be as easy as possible to use, if not then they will try something different.
- Accessible for anyone and from anywhere - The computing world has changed with advancement of cloud, the web and mobile computing. A new generation has grown up without PC desktop and wants to do maximum tasks from tablet or mobile. Other business software has embraced these paradigms shift much earlier, CFD is the last.
- Affordable � Last 10 years has been turbulent economy time period. In this scenario no one want to invest thousands of dollar on software which you may not need tomorrow. If you really care for your customers and if you want them to use it maximum then you have to make solution affordable.
- Fun to use � Fluid dynamics is so interesting subject. Every phenomena in fluid dynamics has so much mystery that it can create more interest than Game of Thrones (pun intended). However, with so much of CFD jargon kills that spirit. We need to bring focus on fluid dynamics and pleasure of exploring new design.
- Social � CFD results and reports have mostly remained deeply buried in hard drives on the name of secrecy. Why engineers should be deprived from Instant gratification? Not all the instant gratification is evil. Social connect rather helps new technology to reach unexplored market.
With these five design goals we started conceptualizing various product ideas. We pivoted with different product ideas and many of these ideas got scrapped as they failed to achieve our design goals. However, each of these failed experiment gave us the valuable insight. They inspired us try different path and what could work. Finally all these efforts lead to define the new fluid flow simulation product - simulationHub. We believe that simulationHub would help to bridge the gap between design and analysis one notch further.
simulationHub is a cloud-based 3D CFD flow simulation app that run on most web browsers on any device (tablet, smartphone, computer). Regardless of what platform you�re running the app, the performance will be the same since you are utilizing cloud-based computing resources with thousands of cores available; not on-board computing.
simulationHub redefines the traditional simulation process for complex CAD model even with dirty CAD assemblies with large openings. App has removed CAD repair and de-featuring process altogether from simulation cycle. We have greatly simplified meshing, solve and post processing to a single click of button so that designer can focus on product design. App is designed in such a way that it can be accessed as Software as a Service (SaaS) from anywhere. simulationHub has built in feature for social share. You can share your 3D simulations on any of the social platform. Your friends and customer can see your simulation in 3D immediately.
Currently, simulationHub app is offered for free of cost for any number of projects. However, in future, we would have premium plans that would be offered with reasonable price in a monthly subscription. Still in future, simulationHub will continue to have FREE subscription plan with limited private simulation and unlimited public simulations.
We began private beta testing of simulationHub couple of months back. We got a great response from all over world with 650+ signups. We incorporate their suggestions, feedbacks and some of the feature request in our new releases. We would like to thanks all our awesome users of private beta for their precious time and suggestions.
Now it�s your turn. Today we are so excited to announce our public Beta version of simulationHub and inviting everyone with a warm welcome to join. You can start simulating your product design within few minutes. We are eagerly waiting to hear from you about your experience and expectations of simulationHub.
Please do to take some time out of your busy schedule to evaluate and provide your reviews. Your feedback and suggestions for our new product would be of great value to us. You can use #simulationHub tag to write your view of BETA evaluation on your preferred social media channel. Looking forward to know your experience. Keep simulating!
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