Simulation software receives user approval

A Mentor Graphics Mechanical Analysis Division product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 31, 2007

Flomerics' research found that 28.5% of respondents said they would strongly recommend, 66.4% said they would recommend and only 5.2% said they would not recommend EFD.

Flomerics has commissioned a survey that shows that 96% of the users of its EFD family of fluid flow simulation software recommend EFD software to others.

Of the users that responded to the survey, 28.5% said they would strongly recommend, 66.4% said they would recommend and only 5.2% said they would not recommend EFD.

The users listed the following as the most important benefit that EFD software brings to their company: reduced prototyping and testing costs (30.4%), improved product performance/functionality (24.4%), reduced design time (17.4%), reduced risk of design mistakes (17.4%), improved product reliability and lifetime (5.2%), improved product efficiency such as lower energy costs (2.6%), sales and marketing impact such as the ability to presenting simulation results to customers (1.7%) and other (0.9%).

The survey respondents use the following computer aided design (CAD) software: Pro/Engineer (36.8%), Catia (23.9%), SolidWorks (7.7%), Solid Edge (7.7%), Unigraphics NX (6.8%) and Autodesk Inventor (6.0%) and other (11.1%).

84.2% of the survey respondents said they were either very satisfied or satisfied with the way that EFD interoperates with the mainstream mechanical design software used at their site.

The survey respondents cited the greatest strengths of EFD software as its ease of use (72.3%), interface with mechanical design software (47.0%), solution speed (21.7%), price (20.5%), technical support (19.3%), functionality/range of applications (18.1%) and other (2.4%).

The bulk of the survey respondents said they were either very satisfied (37.9%) or satisfied (56.9%) with the technical support they receive from Flomerics.

As a result, 47.8% said their organisation's use of EFD software is likely to increase in the future and 51.3% said it will stay the same.

The respondents to the survey are from Europe (61.0%), North and South America (28.0%) and Asia/Pacific and Africa (11.0%).

Of the respondents 44.1% are mechanical design engineers, 17.8% are engineering managers, 9.3% are project managers or product managers and 28.8% have other titles.

Flomerics is contributing to the wider use of CFD among design engineers by developing its EFD product line for busy mechanical designers with limited time for CFD analysis.

EFD interacts directly with the native 3D CAD geometry at the heart of the mechanical design process, while the user operates the CFD software inside their familiar MCAD environment.

The EFD software family includes EFD.Pro - a fully embedded CFD solution within the Pro/Engineer environment; EFD.V5, - a fully embedded CFD solution within the Catia V5 environment and EFD.Lab - a general-purpose fluid analysis tool that includes a built-in solid modeler and works with Autodesk Inventor, UGS NX, Solid Edge.

The EFD software requires no translation or copies of data, so the solid model maintains intelligence such as assembly hierarchy, design constraints and features.

EFD makes it easy to perform flow simulation because it analyses the geometry, calculates the fluid spaces and generates the computational grid automatically.