Larger companies often have great difficulty innovating at the product and service level. Often innovation in large companies is solely concerned with business process innovation, i.e., freeing up their rigid hierarchies to better manage their existing business processes. When it comes to new exciting products and services small companies are the engines of innovation in most industries.

Saturn V First Stage Rocket Engines

Did you know that Caedium can produce 3D stereoscopic images of your CFD results? You can view them in real time using red-blue glasses. The only drawback is obtaining a pair of said glasses - well not any more.

Caedium Anaglyph 3D Stereoscopic Image

The natural beauty of fluid flow is beyond doubt, just picture water vortices in a stream or smoke rising and mixing with the surrounding air. To reveal the intricacies of fluid flow in experiments, fluorescent dyes are often used. But what do you get when you weave tubes carrying pulses of fluorescent liquid into a dress? A dazzling display of light pulses.

Fluid DressLicense: CC BY-NC 2.0, casual profanity

Often with the manufacture of physical products tooling up can make or break a project. Imagine creating the jigs and constructing the custom machines for a new car such as the Chevy Volt, and you can easily see where a large portion of the estimated US$750M development costs are destined. The cost of tooling up serves as a huge barrier to entry for the car market and it is one of the main reasons that there are relatively few car companies producing cars for the masses. OK, but what does this have to do with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tooling up?

Flexible CFD Tooling Up With Caedium

The theme for the 2010 Blog Action Day is water. Unfortunately I don't have any big ideas to improve the inequality of access to clean water across the planet. However, I do hold out hope for efficiency improvements in industrial processes that use water. Why? Because when given the right incentives and resources, engineers' ingenuity can be channeled to overcome seemingly insurmountable problems. Looking for an example? Engineers landed men on the moon and returned them safely to earth over 40 years ago with the computing power of today's digital wrist watches.

Cyclone Separator: CFD Simulation

The term 'Cloud Computing' is a rather nebulous term that is open to interpretation, filling some with fear and others with delight. So in an effort to define what the cloud could mean for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations, we undertook a feasibility study, sponsored by the Microsoft DPE team, to see how to couple Caedium with a cloud-based CFD simulation service. We chose to harness the strength of Caedium's interactive simulation setup and results visualization by keeping them close to the user on a local machine, and then outsourcing the intensive numerical CFD simulation as a Windows Azure cloud service.

Caedium using Azure Cloud Service

It seems you can go online and find the price of almost anything these days. You want to know the price of a Mercedes, just visit their website and there it is. If you want to know the price of a Honda, same again - it's easy. However, if you want to know the price of commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software then you are out of luck. I guess it's a case of 'if you have to ask, you can't afford.' Symscape is one of the few exceptions - if you happen to stop by our Caedium product pages you'll see how much our CFD software costs - what an innovation, actually publishing CFD software prices!

How much for CFD?

Remember being shunned at college (at least in England) for being an engineer (or scientist) by the oh so trendy arts and humanities crowd? I do. We geeks were characterized as uncultured loners and losers. Well I've been re-examining the evidence and I think we should have stood our ground and turned this whole loner-loser-uncultured-geek thing on its head and fired it right back at the arts and humanities posse.

Engineers Did This: Apollo 11 Moon LandingImage courtesy of NASA

Hopefully you had a successful time simulating your application with the advice served up in "CFD Novice to Expert Part 6: CFD For Your Application." Before I finish up this 7 part series I want to offer some parting thoughts on where and how best to use CFD within a product design cycle.

Open Wheel Race Car Wake Streamlines

With the grounding you now have in fluid dynamics, CFD, and some quality hands-on CFD time thanks to "CFD Novice to Expert Part 5: Hands-on CFD," now is the time to put it all together and focus on your specific application. Here we go with part 6, the penultimate part, in this 7-part series.

CFD Simulation Around a Pickup Truck