Engineers highlight MCAD/CFD integration

A Mentor Graphics Mechanical Analysis Division product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Nov 3, 2006

Online survey highlights engineers' views on integration between mechanical computer aided design and computational fluid dynamics software.

Flomerics has released the results of a new online survey highlighting engineers' views on integration between mechanical computer aided design (MCAD) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software.

When asked how important MCAD integration is for typical CFD users, 46% say it is "very important today" and an overwhelming 68% say it will be "very important in the future".

When the results are confined only to users of mechanical CAD software, these%ages increase to 52% and 74%, respectively.

When asked what "CFD integrated with MCAD" means, most people chose the option describing the tightest level of integration: "A fully embedded solution in a single environment".

"The CFD user interface looks and operates like the MCAD software and the CFD solver interacts directly with the native MCAD solid model data".

"Most commercial CFD codes today are unable to solve directly using the native MCAD geometry", said Ivo Weinhold, EFD Product Manager for Flomerics.

"Even vendors claiming 'upfront CFD' capability actually require a translation from the native MCAD data into some neutral format such as Parasolid before the CFD analysis is performed".

"The problem with this approach - apart from being slower - is that once transferred into the CFD environment all the design intelligence associated with the geometry such as assembly hierarchy, constraints and features are lost and only dumb geometrical entities remain".

"This survey confirms that what engineers want is a familiar and consistent user interface for both the MCAD and CFD software, and full bi-directional associativity between the analysis data and the MCAD model".

"Engineers also benefit from employing native CAD data and native kernel functions for meshing, preprocessing, and results visualisation".

"All of these requirements are satisfied by our EFD family of CFD software".

The MCAD/CFD survey is based on over 600 completed responses from engineers using both CFD and mechanical design software in a broad range of industries.

The top three industries represented were aerospace and defense (32%), education (27%) and automotive (23%).

81% of respondents use CFD software and 55% use MCAD software.

The EFD family of CFD software from Flomerics includes EFD.Pro - a fully embedded CFD solution within the Pro/Engineer environment; EFD.V5, - a fully embedded CFD solution within the Catia environment, and EFD.Lab - a general-purpose fluid analysis tool that includes a built-in solid modeller.

The analysis engine at the heart of the EFD product suite is the same analysis engine used by SolidWorks in their tightly-integrated CFD software - CosmosFloWorks.

All the software products in the EFD family work directly with the native CAD geometry and require no translation of data, so the solid model maintains intelligence such as assembly hierarchy, constraints, and features.

Users can take advantage of the existing data to conduct "what if?" analyses directly from within their chosen design platform.

EFD makes it easy to perform flow simulation because it analyses the geometry and generates the computational grid in the background while the user only needs to interact with the familiar MCAD interface.