The Costs of CFD
A Guide to Estimating the Organizational Costs of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Simulations
While the use case and needs analysis will provide the basis of a CFD acquisition strategy, there are several potential hardware, software, and manpower combinations that can meet any simulation requirement.
Your needs analysis, personnel capabilities, and cost considerations will drive decision making. The physics you need to simulate in order to achieve your project objectives is a relatively simple filter to apply that should help reduce the number of options available to you right away. For example, if you are intending to model open-surface flows, your options are quickly reduced to only those codes able to perform Volume-of-Fluid (VoF) calculations. Most software companies do a good job of describing what physics they are capable of modeling.
You can also read our 5-part series on Comparing CFD Software in which we’ve broken down some of the more widely used packages and their capabilities based on a combination of first-hand experience, research, and user surveys.
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