CFD Analysis & Services

Studying the effects of airflow over an object is of a paramount importance for design considerations. To understand the impact of the aerodynamic forces on engineering objects such as automobiles, aircrafts and locomotives, it is required to set up external airflow conditions that resemble actual physical scenario.

There’s a common misconception within engineers and designers that the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is only fruitful for designing aircrafts, racing cars or space rockets. However, the principle of fluid dynamics is also applicable in developing efficient buildings, and is thus useful for building designers too.

Solving a fluid flow problem for a product design through CFD has been profound within the engineering community. However, the Navier-Stokes equations that are solved for a fluid flow problem require imposing restrictive conditions, in order to get an analytical solution.

It’s important to know how your product design will function in real-world conditions, before actually going for a full-fledged production. This is what the essence of engineering is and the actual purpose of prototyping. However, the increased market competition is leading engineers and manufacturers to develop products in tight deadlines, and is becoming even more difficult for them to afford costs of conducting prototyping trials.

The fiercely competitive market, where customer demands shift consistently and environmental challenges keep on growing, product manufacturing businesses are facing extreme pressure on improving product efficiency and usefulness.

CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) has come a long way from being a specialized tool used for expensive aerospace designs to a more generalized tool easily available for engineers to test any product undergoing fluid flow interaction. This is largely due to the democratization of CFD software, enabling engineers to optimize product designs quickly and efficiently.

Industrial valves are vital to process industries and manufacturing plants. Regulating the flow of liquids, gases or fluidized solids, these devices keep the plant functioning safely. However, the rising demand and competition in the market has forced valve manufacturers to come up with new innovative designs that are efficient as well as require less fabrication costs and development time.

Offshore platforms are designed considering the effects of wind loads on the structure, to ensure its safety and reliability. It is important to perform wind load estimation early during the design phase to avoid changes in the design later during the development stage. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is the right and cost-effective method. It provides the ability to assess design changes without the need of repeating the tests on wind tunnel and helps in taking key design decisions quickly.

Design simulations are increasingly becoming important in real-world applications. Be it about obtaining a driver’s license or learning to fly an aircraft, simulators are used in diverse business settings for different purposes. Through simulation, outcomes can be predicted mathematically, so that risks can be assessed, products can be improved and failures can be avoided before even performing physical tests.

Companies who are looking to develop innovative and energy efficient products are only left with two choices. Either they make products complicated by adding smart technologies or they can develop disruptive technology. Both the choices however require exploring large design space. With complex design, it is even more difficult to interact and identify design trade-offs, since you have constraints to limit design possibilities.

Engineers most often rely on analytical modeling for engineering design and analysis performed using equations to obtain solution for a problem in consideration. While analytical modeling assists engineers to understand the physics involved in the product operation, it increasingly becomes complex when trying to model phenomena with more complexity.

Manufacturer of turbomachinery should adopt CFD approach for delivering quality products, reduced time and cost by eliminating prototypes and optimizing the output of the entire setup.

CFD analysis for oil plants and refineries helps in predicting performance and lifespan of various components. Maldistribution of flow results in costly to recover catalyst exhaustion. Optimizing the critical process of separation with help of CFD analysis is also been opted for. Enhancing the uptime to attain maximum profit is the main goal when operating a refinery, as unplanned downtime is likely to have daunting impact on operating margins; but can be eliminated or kept minimal by comprehensive CFD analysis of the refinery/plant.