The newcomer to the category is ANSYS with its Discovery Li ve and AIM products integrated with its SpaceClaim 3D modeling platform. Autodesk has also recently announced that Fusion 360 will communicate directly with Autodesk CFD 2 019.

The online CAD platform Onshape promotes export of native files to the SimScale “cloud CFD” platform. Other CAD programs have partially integrated the capabilities of standalone software using plugins. We’ll be looking in detail at the two leaders in this market segment, SolidWorks / Flow Simulation from Dassault Systèmes and Inventor / Autodesk CFD from Autodesk, as well as a relative newcomer in Discovery Li ve. One particularly beneficial aspect of CAD embedded or CAD-linked CFD that should be noted is its potential for enabling and streamlining parametric studies. Never-minding that CAD integration is not the utopia that software marketeers make it out to be, these tools have been adopted by thousands of users and are popular with companies developing fluid-related products on modest budgets. Claims that CAD integration provides a significant advantage to any of these well-known challenges are mostly false. From our vantage point, a direct CAD interface with CFD in and of itself does not provide any new or improved solutions to the biggest challenges of CFD simulation, i.e., geometry simplification and cleanup, extracting the fluid region from what is typically a 3D model of the solids involved, ensuring simulation accuracy through high-quality meshing, and CFD process quality controls.

While pushing simulation forward in the design cycle is a noble concept that has the potential to reduce costly engineering change orders, getting there is not as simple as making CFD analysis available to designers within the 3D CAD interfaces they are familiar with. Overhyped, but a Good Value in the Right Situation

Fusion 360 simulation cost