Virtual Product Testing, CFD and Cool Pictures

Last week I got access to the CFDesign’s upcoming release of CFDesign 2010. It hits a spot our new Solid Edge Simulation product does not touch, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). If you work with any products that have to deal with airflow or fluids, or heat transfer in these type of environments you may need to use CFD to understand what is happening. The range of uses can be from PC’s with fans for cooling to golf balls to rockets.

Now I’m not a CFD expert and have never run the CFDesign product before but I didn’t have much trouble ramping up. I happened to have a hybrid rocket nozzle with the design in Solid Edge that I used today (note that the video in the last link is unrelated to this nozzle but shows why nozzle design is important)
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nozzle in the rocket assembly


Solid Edge V19 design

So, with a little help from the CFDesign 2010 software, I was able to map the flow patterns…


CFDesign 2010 particle flow

…and also get an interesting look into the particle velocity as it flows through the nozzle.


CFDesign 2010 Velocity

Now I don’t build many rockets – this is actually my son’s hybrid rocket that he is working on while at the university. However, I do build custom PC’s as a hobby and CFDesign has quite a few tutorials just for things like this. I wonder if I can get a good design set up for optimal cooling of an over clocked CPU before my license runs out.

P.S. Solid Edge users can click here for the CFDesign Solid Edge Integration.