A look into the future of CFD

We always say that CFD is a safe bet for the future due to its enormous potential. In today’s post we are going to make a brief review of the expected trend of CFD simulations in the future in relation to their use, costs and forms of application.

The trend of the use of CFD tools so far.

The use of CFD tools has been on the rise year after year since their use to solve engineering problems in the 1960s to the present day. This is so for a number of reasons. One of them is the development of more and more exhaustive models that allow a greater number of phenomenologies to be described and with greater accuracy. In addition, technological capabilities have greatly increased, which has made it possible to have more computational resources to solve problems using finite elements, which means a considerable decrease in the time required to perform a simulation. As we have already mentioned in “5 examples of curious applications of CFD tools”, we can find applications of finite element simulation in the most unsuspected industries, unequivocal evidence of its growing popularity.

The ideal CFD environment in the future.

Guilles Eggenspieler (Director of ANSYS North America – West Academic Program) perfectly captures what the ideal future CFD environment should be in one of his blog posts. In it he discusses the four key aspects of how CFD should look in the future.

One of them should be to consider that in an optimization / design project the pre / post processed and meshing process does not add value and, therefore, this should be as easy and automated as possible so that the engineer dedicates all his time to the analysis of results.

Another ideal aspect in relation to the use of CFD is the ability to solve not just one case in a short time, but a multitude of cases to optimize designs quickly.

Finally, this entry also mentions that it must be essential that during the results display stage the user is able to make modifications without undoing the entire model, something that currently represents a major bottleneck in these projects.

In summary, in the future, the CFD tool should be considerably faster, easier to use and more intuitive. At the same time, the engineers in charge of carrying out this type of projects will not have to know in depth the technical aspects of the simulations, being able to focus all their knowledge on the design and optimization process.

Cost trend in the future.

As we discussed in our previous post  “Advantages of performing CFD simulations in the cloud”, in recent years, the use of platforms to perform simulations in the cloud has become widespread, so that this allows not only to save time , but also costs in acquiring expensive equipment and licenses. Taking into account the reception that the business model of obtaining a license for use by SaaS subscription (“Software as a service”) is having in the market, it is very possible that in the future most CFD simulations will be carried out in the cloud already a much lower cost for the user than it is today.