Initiative boosts fluid software sales

A Mentor Graphics Mechanical Analysis Division product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 28, 2008

Unlike traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation software, EFD operates inside the mechanical CAD tools that engineers are familiar with, without any transfer of data.

Since Flomerics launched its EFD for Education Initiative a year ago there has been a four-fold increase in the number of sites using its engineering fluid dynamics (EFD) software for teaching and research purposes.

Flomerics aims to ensure that mechanical engineering students and researchers have access to the latest fluid dynamics software used in industry.

Unlike traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation software, EFD operates inside the mechanical CAD tools that engineers are familiar with, without any transfer of data.

"With EFD there's no need to learn a new user interface, no CAD export and the meshing is fully automated, so students can focus solely on learning about fluid dynamics instead of how to use the software", said John Parry, Research Manager at Flomerics.

"I'm delighted by how well EFD has been received by the educational community".

Research at the University of Puerto Rico is focused on the structural behaviour of canopies of gas stations under wind load.

"A large number of failures of canopies during the past hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the US Gulf Coast in 2005 was observed and confirmed by observations from previous hurricanes".

"Our aim is to understand the influence of various parameters, including the size of parapets, location of canopies, etc".

"At present there is limited information on the pressure coefficients due to wind on horizontal canopies, which we will investigate using EFD", said Luis Godoy, Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of the Civil Infrastructure Research Center, University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez.

The EFD product family provides general-purpose fluid flow and heat transfer analysis software, combining all simulation steps, starting with reading CAD data, model definition, mesh generation, solving, post-processing, through to the generation of result presentations, all within a single software environment.

EFD.Pro is fully embedded within the Pro/Engineer Wildfire environment; EFD.V5 - EFD is a fully embedded CFD solution within the Catia V5 environment; and EFD.Lab is a general purpose CAD-embedded fluid flow and heat transfer software.

EFD has sophisticated physical models to simulate a wide range of engineering tasks, from creeping non-Newtonian flows to supersonic gas flows with high mach numbers.

EFD is also provided with a number of detailed ready-built and documented validation cases that can be used as course material.

And unlike some other traditional CFD programs, the EFD educational version has the same capabilities as the commercial version, with no restrictions on physical modelling or meshing, so it is also ideal for research purposes.

EFD is available for immediate shipment to educational institutions.