Today’s world harnesses the power of nature’s elements the best way possible via windmill fields and hydropower stations, but engineers still try to understand the science behind fluid dynamics and its impact on their designs.

Autodesk CFD provides a powerful modelling and simulation tool for Computational Fluid Dynamics models. With its help, engineering teams can run CFD simulations to analyze flow design, heat transfer and other parameters to create simple to complex liquid, gas and air systems.

Before diving in to create a new project, it is recommended to take the time and go through the application’s guide and tutorials to get acquainted to the application and fully understand its capabilities.

You will be happy to find out that Autodesk CFD comes with a generous collection of video and written tutorials and guidelines for new users, which allow you to learn about Autodesk CFD at your own pace. Tutorials include examples and samples, all to help you get the most out of the application.

Creating a new design study is the first step to take. Autodesk CFD can import models created using various other CAD software, including Autodesk Inventor, Shape Manager, Parasolid, SolidWorks, and more, as well as meshed representation files.

In other words, the CAD model needs to be prepared in a third-party application and imported or pushed directly to Autodesk CFD. The only condition is that the model needs to have a fluid component to allow flow analysis.

Autodesk CFD allows material management, setting up boundary and initial conditions, mesh sizing and motion simulation. The available geometry tools can help modify the CAD geometry before running a simulation using edge merging, small object removal, void fill and external volume creation. The development team of Autodesk CFD advises optimizing a model for simulation, as you can read in the extensive documentation.

Autodesk CFD provides support for physical models such as flow (hydrostatic pressure) and heat transfer, allowing the progressive improvement of a mesh by running the simulation multiple times.

Autodesk CFD caters to engineers interested in fluid dynamics and the way fluids might interact with the products they are designing. With its help, a thorough analysis can be run to determine the performance of a design. Moreover, the Autodesk CFD Viewer, which is included in the package, encourages teamwork and collaboration, allowing model sharing and quick viewing of models and the graphical results of a Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation.