Dear Readers,

Today we have a great post by a guest author - Jeff Waters. Jeff has been involved with CFD and 3D modeling industry for quite sometime.  He has been kind enough to share with us his tips for “recession proofing your CFD work.” As you read this piece, you will probably see a lot of similarities between Jeff’s point of view and my own. Interestingly enough, we  each wrote our posts independently. What does that tell you about paying attention to how simulation is being used in your company?

Jeff is an engineer who also has his own blog http://lifeupfront.com/ . Check it out and enjoy Jeff’s post!

Masha

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Brief Author Bio:

Jeff Waters currently helps customers to accelerate CAD & CAE processes through 3D Direct Modeling technologies at SpaceClaim Corporation. He spent the previous decade at Blue Ridge Numerics, helping manufacturing and product development companies efficiently implement upfront CFD. Jeff covers both topics in depth on his blog, Life Upfront, and can be reach for questions and comments at jeff.waters@spaceclaim.com

Recession proofing your CFD work

Educate your colleagues on the business value of CFD

CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) can be a wildly useful tool in industry. I know that, and you probably know that. But, your boss may not. Your CEO most definitely does not. It can be challenging to get CFD accepted as a valuable and necessary product development activity across the wider organization. In this economic climate, every job function needs to sing for its supper. Now is the time to take a hard look at how you employ simulation methods, and how others perceive the importance of your work.

If you are responsible for performing high-end CFD simulations for your company, take a moment to step away from that Petrov-Galerkin research article. Take a closer look at the people around you. If you ask the president of your company to define “element”, he’s most likely to dredge up some high-school memory of the Periodic Table…. as in Lead… as in Pb. Likewise, your extended family of Systems, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Engineers may be so out of tune with the basics of CFD that they can’t even describe what you do for a living.

Keep in mind, however, that those engineers are much closer to the frontlines than you in terms of getting new product out the door. They are fighting the daily fires that arise in the course of doing business and meeting product delivery deadlines. An outsider viewing this scene may well assume that those job functions are more essential to the bottom line than your advanced CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) work.

Bad CFD perceptions

How do colleagues view CFD work in your organization? I’ve worked directly with nearly 1000 companies in the last decade. Most of that time was focused on putting basic CFD capabilites in the hands of non-expert, casual users. These were typically Mechanical Engineers with 4 year degrees. Most of them knew little about CFD before I came calling… despite usually having an expert Fluent or CFX user lurking in the wings.

At some point in the sales process, these folks would invariably pull me aside to complain about their CFD gurus being out of touch and useless. I’m being blunt, but this is a pretty common attitude that may exist in your workplace without your knowledge. Most people don’t publicly throw colleagues under the bus.

I took great advantage of this attitude whenever it popped up. It was a great way to make the point that these Mechanical Engineers could in fact benefit from a casual-level CFD tool and bypass those PhD researchers in the back corner.

Why do people lose interest in the CFD department?

People are often inclined to expect perfectly accurate answers from CFD. If they don’t have a background in Finite Methods, this is a completely natural expectation. Think about it. In their minds, you are simply using a software tool. Without experience in the many choices you have in terms of meshing styles, turbulence models, and a multitude of other variables, they might be drawing a connection to tools like Microsoft Excel. You would certainly expect Excel to properly sum a column of numbers, right?

Listen and watch closely the next time you present your CFD results in front of a larger group. Could that misconception be in play? If so, you really need to take action and start educating. First, however, some introspection might be in order.

What do you know about the business of your business?

Let’s assume your company makes paint-drying furnaces for automotive assembly lines. How much does a typical furnace cost on the open market? If you can’t answer that question, we have a problem. I often ask that question of people I meet to assess how much clout they will have as the sales process proceeds. It is amazing how often the answer is off by orders of magnitude! Worse, lots of people won’t even hazard a guess:

“Oh, I don’t know much about that. I’m not in Marketing… my job is to focus on CFD.”

More questions to consider:

·          What is your yearly sales volume?

·          Who buys your products?

·          How are your products sold?

·          To what degree do your customers influence product requirements?

If you don’t have a sense for these and are unwilling to invest a little research to learn, your job may be in danger. In fact, you would have far more job security by moving back into Academia or putting your expertise to work in the Government research arena.

If you intend to stay in industry, you must accept that your company exists to sell product. Ultimately, any work you do in the CFD field needs to directly support that mandate. Before you can effectively educate your frontline colleagues about the realities of CFD, you’ll need to align your talking points to actual business challenges and objectives.

How to explain CFD in business terms

First, are you too hung up on CFD accuracy? CFD snobbery doesn’t provide much job security in this economic downturn. I highly recommend that you focus on trend data wherever possible. Don’t spend months fighting for 1% accuracy on a single model when you could solve 100 comparative design studies (with a known 30% magnitude inaccuracy) in the same amount of time.

If at all possible, try to push your CFD work towards optimization and away from validation.

Next, make sure you understand how the results you’ve generated would be achieved without the benefit of CFD. In other words, how much labor, material cost, and time would it have taken to gather actual test data with physical prototyping and testing? Once you get started, this will develop into a natural habit. Every time you present results, write a final report, or discuss your work with colleagues, include these metrics. For example:

“Our CFD modeling showed that furnace temperature uniformity could be improved by 300% through a redesign of the flue baffle. This was the result of a careful study of 50 possible configurations conducted over a 2 month period. It would have cost approximately $200k and 10 man-months to gather this data from experimental prototypes.”

Let’s face it- Your colleagues probably do not care about the difference between Eularian and Lagrangian advection schemes. But they will certainly get excited about you saving $200k and 8 man-months of labor!

Once you get used to expressing your results with this new addendum, kick it up a notch. How exactly does your work affect profits?

In this example, furnace temperature uniformity might be a huge selling factor. Are your customers more likely to purchase your furnace over a competitor’s poor performing product? How many units were sold in the 8 months associated with an early product release? What effect did that have on market share?

Get a handle on some of these figures and talk about them. Once you are completely aware of your business impact, you should be proud! Ultimately, you should be more proud of your impact on a business initiative than your success at coding the perfect UDF radiation model. Once you adopt this mentality, you will naturally become more valuable to your company… and your colleagues will know it.

Tags: CFD, communications skills, computer modeling, computer simulation, computer software, engineering modeling, R&D, research, software modeling

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 2:18 pm and is filed under CFD, Computer Modeling Best Practices, Guest Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.