Quote:
Originally Posted by Shankenstein
As others have said, FEA and CFD are both useful... but only as much as you can guarantee the results.
If you have governing equations that are valid throughout the space, and a mesh that is well-defined around the objects of interest... then you can set the boundary and initial conditions to realistic. Spin the top and see what happens!
Your basic courses in fluid dynamics will teach you laws of conservation that are the base of most CFD. As the situation becomes more extreme, you'll need more flexible/complicated governing equations and boundary conditions. Typically, the extreme conditions are what you care about... which means you have to get "down and dirty" to get a meaningful solution.
Air/fluid flow, temperature (heat transfer), internal stresses, composite layer interactions, magnetic/electric field interactions, plastic/metal mold flow, fatigue/vibration stresses, etc. Each one is a different set of governing equations, boundary conditions, and initial conditions. Much of the analysis techniques are similar, but it's a different medium/model/environment.
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This is so very correct. Anybody who follows what I do on here know I am a huge proponent and user of cfd and fea. However, I am a proponent of using it to get meaningful solutions. I hate seeing young engineers or people in general who think that it is just pressing some buttons and waiting for it to spit out a result and look at colorful pictures. It takes a lot of work and knowledge to set up computational problems correctly with the right governing equations, boundary conditions, and initial conditions. It is also amazing that in many cases, you can get meaningful results with just some hand calculations (or my favorite is combining that with excel). You need to know the theory as well as the application.