John Parry’s Blog
John Parry’s Blog RSSLies, Damned Lies, and “CFD Comparison Charts” – Part IV
So, after three blog posts, what is the moral of this Blue Ridge Numerics’ “CFD Comparison Chart” saga?
Well, clearly one should not believe every “CFD Comparison Chart”! – or even the many “charts” that one vendor has put out. Rather, the story suggests that people who are thinking of buying a CFD tool for the first time might be well advised to be wary of what vendors claim about their own software relative to or as well as other company’s products. I’d also be very wary of vendors who use simple CFD demo models to show the software for your application.
Tags: 5-Star Support, Blue Ridge Numerics, Caveat Emptor, CFD Comparison Chart, CFdesign, Choosing a CFD Code, Computational Fluid Dynamics, concurrent CFD, Ed Williams, FloEFD, Global Environment Fund Management Corporation, Jim Spann, upfront CFD
Lies, Damned Lies, and “CFD Comparison Charts” – Part III
In my earlier posts I pointed out some glaring errors in the “CFD Comparison Chart” that Blue Ridge Numerics released on March 19th this year. Once we became aware of the “Chart” we quickly wrote a letter to Ed Williams, the CEO of Blue Ridge Numerics, and asked that they reveal the technical workings behind their outrageous claims. Including those I’ve mentioned, we pointed out a total of 6 very obvious initial errors applying to both FloEFD and Solidworks Flow Simulation in their document, directing them to publicly-available documents (some are mentioned in my previous blogs) and other information on the internet.
We also asked that they remove the document from the public domain, reserving the right to take legal action against them if they did not. We wanted them to cease and desist from using such a blatantly misleading CFD document, within which our product was so badly and unfairly represented, but also give them the opportunity to correct the document and send it back out to those engineers they had misled.
Blue Ridge Numerics wrote back to us via their lawyers claiming the “CFD Comparison Chart” had ‘inadvertent errors’ in it. Jim Spann, their VP Marketing, simultaneously produced a second chart they called a “Revised CFD Comparison Chart” for Desktop Engineering downloaders to use, but with no acknowledgement of the other misleading statements in the document about FloEFD, or that their claims about ANSYS CFX and ANSYS FLUENT were also wrong. Again, our Product Management team examined Jim Spann’s “Revised CFD Comparison Chart”. Blue Ridge Numerics had fixed the 6 very obvious mistakes we had pointed out for FloEFD and SolidWorks Flow Simulation in our letter, but we noted that many other false and misleading statements remained in the “Revised CFD Comparison Chart”.
Again we pointed out by way of our lawyers to Mr Spann and Mr Williams that there were still numerous errors in Blue Ridge Numerics’ “Revised CFD Comparison Chart” and we again demonstrated our claims by pointing out publicly-available information to prove these features existed in FloEFD. Those we cited are circled in the “Revised Chart” shown below.
We again asked that they remove such a technically misleading document from the public domain and their sales process. Again they refused by return letter!
So what is the moral of the story? I’m going to leave my thoughts on that until next time, as I’m also working on some common-sense advice about how to choose a CFD code with or without “CFD Comparison Charts” which I want to provide to you to close out this series of blog posts.
Dr. J, Hampton Court
Tags: Blue Ridge Numerics, CFD Comparison Chart, CFdesign, Computational Fluid Dynamics, concurrent CFD, Ed Williams, FloEFD, Global Environment Fund Management Corporation, Jim Spann, upfront CFD
Lies, Damned Lies, and “CFD Comparison Charts” – Part II
In my last post I pointed out a very obvious mistake in Blue Ridge Numerics’ “CFD Comparison Chart” of March 19th this year, which incorrectly stated that FloEFD can only handle incompressible sub-sonic flows.
The reason I highlighted this as the most obvious mistake in the “CFD Comparison Chart” is that FloEFD can trace its history back to the Russian Aerospace Industry in the late 1980s originating from a code called Aeroshape-3D, having been developed by aerospace experts targeting transonic, supersonic and even hypersonic flows. Technical papers on Aeroshape-3D are still available on the internet to this day, as shown by this example published by NASA.
Tags: Blue Ridge Numerics, CFD Comparison Chart, CFdesign, Computational Fluid Dynamics, concurrent CFD, Ed Williams, electronics cooling, Fan Characterization, FloEFD, Global Environment Fund Management Corporation, Jim Spann, Pump Efficiency, Rotating Reference Frame, Solar Heating, Turbomachinery, upfront CFD
Lies, Damned Lies, and “CFD Comparison Charts” – Part I
Rarely do I get a feeling of déjà vu in my professional life, but in March of this year something I was shown gave me a flashback to the 1980s. Some people will remember those halcyon days of two decades ago when commercial CFD was still in its infancy. Way back then the big commercial CFD vendors (Fluent, CHAM, Fidap, Flomerics, STAR-CD, and AEA) would regularly bring out CFD Comparison Charts comparing their CFD software with all their major competitors, usually in the form of long technical feature lists. It was like a Cold War nuclear arms race within CFD – one vendor would claim to have a Reynolds Stress Turbulence Model, another vendor would claim to have a Renormalization Group k-e model, and so on, until codes were offering 20 or more turbulence models! It became counter-productive as the different codes’ unique selling points and specialist capabilities got lost amongst all the other statements. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: ANSYS, Blue Ridge Numerics, CFD Comparison Chart, CFdesign, CFX, Computational Fluid Dynamics, concurrent CFD, Desktop Engineering, Ed Williams, FloEFD, Fluent, Global Environment Fund Management Corporation, Hypersonic, Jim Spann, Shock Capture, SolidWorks, Supersonic, Transonic, upfront CFD
Mechanical Analysis Products Now in Mentor’s Higher Education Program
If you’re involved in CFD in education in any way this will be of interest to you. Since shortly after Flomerics were acquired by Mentor Graphics we’ve been working towards getting out products into Mentor’s Higher Education Program (HEP), and we’ve finally got it done.
To my knowledge, the availability of potentially millions of dollars worth of commercial CFD software, plus support and training, for around US$500 annually is unique in the CFD business, so this is something of a game changer. Here are the details:
Tags: CFD, concurrent CFD, Education, electronics cooling, FloEFD, FloTHERM, FloVENT, Higher Education, Mentor HEP, thermal design, thermal management, upfront CFD
Sony Vaio laptop in mass ‘recall’
“Authorities in the US have instructed Sony to conduct a recall of its Vaio laptops, after problems with overheating were reported.” started this article on the BBC’s web site.
There is a saying, ” the news is never as good or as bad as it is first reported”. And so it is with this story. It’s not a product recall, as the story later goes on to explain, but what grabbed my attention was that the problem can be cured by an on-line firmware update. In my view that means it’s not a thermal problem at all. Rather it’s essentially a software fault of some sort that’s causing some part of the system to pull a lot more power than it was expected to during design, or needs to for the laptop to function normally.
Tags: CFD, design process, electronics cooling, FloTHERM, reliability, thermal design, thermal management
Nearly Back to Business as Usual
I’ve not posted for a while, which is rather remiss of me. I underestimated the response we would get to our Heatsink 201 webinar, which I gather was our most popular ever, and the number of questions that people would ask. I had around 120 questions, which after removing duplicates and those to do with logistics ended up at around 80, so it took a while to answer them all. I’ll select a couple of good ones and post them and my answers next time.
Tags: CFD, concurrent CFD, electronics cooling, heatsink, heatsink 201, JEDEC JC15, NAFEMS, thermal design
The Debate about Liquid Cooled Data Centers
I’ve been remiss in not posting for a couple of weeks, so I’m trying to get back in the saddle. I’ve been working on other things that have taken up a fair bit of time. One is a web seminar on heatsinks – Heatsink 201 – Even More about Heat Sinks which follows on from Alexandra Francois-Saint-Cyr’s very successful Heat Sink 101 web seminar.
Back in March I posted about IBM’s work on liquid cooling to take Moore’s Law to 2025. As a side note I observed that, one of the main benefits of liquid cooling in a data center is that the high grade waste heat generated can be used for heating purposes. This changes both the economics of deploying a liquid cooling solution and the environmental impact. The reason this is so important is that data centers are one of the fastest growing consumers of energy.
Tags: air cooling, ASHRAE, Building HVAC, CFD, Cost saving, Data center, electronics cooling, FloTHERM, FloVENT, Google, Green building design, liquid cooling, thermal management
MicReD Technology Wins Highest Technical Honor
Vladimír Székely
It was great to read that Dr. Vladimír Székely, has received the Dennis Gabor Award for Innovation for his work leading the team at MicReD on the development of the T3Ster (pronounced “trister”) technology. Congratulations Vladimír, it is richly deserved.
The Dennis Gabor (original Hungarian: Dénes Gábor) Award is Hungary’s highest technical honor, named after the Hungarian electrical engineer and inventor of holography, for which Gabor received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971. Dr. Székely is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has published around 400 technical papers and developed the mathematical background of the structure function based thermal transient methodology some 20 years ago.
Tags: Budapest Unversity of Technology, Department of Electron Devices, electronics cooling, MicReD, power LEDs, PROFIT, T3ster, thermal characterization, thermal design, thermal tester, transient thermal tester
Sticking Plaster and Light beats Skin Cancer
Thermal management of LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) is an important application for CFD software, which is helping designers use LEDs for high-power lighting applications. However, LEDs are changing our lives in so many more ways than simply providing more energy efficient or more aesthetic lighting solutions.
Last year I posted about a light therapy device that desensitizes the nasal passages, inhibiting the allergic reaction and reducing irritation caused by hayfever – something I suffer from for a couple of months of the year, so I can confirm that it really works. Since then I’ve also come across a treatment for cold sores, using 1072 nm narrow waveband light, which interestingly enough corresponds to the peak light emission wavelength of a water molecule. The research was published back in 2001 in The Journal of Clinical and Experimental Dermatology and now appears to have been approved for prescription by the UK’s National Health Service.
Tags: air cooling, CFD, electronics cooling, energy saving, FloEFD, LEDs, Light therapy, reliability, skin cancer, thermal characterization, thermal design
About John Parry’s Blog
A mixed bag of things that interest me professionally -CFD technology and its use in education, cooling technologies and the place of thermal design in the overall design flow.
Latest Posts
- Lies, Damned Lies, and “CFD Comparison Charts” – Part IV
- Lies, Damned Lies, and “CFD Comparison Charts” – Part III
- Lies, Damned Lies, and “CFD Comparison Charts” – Part II
- Lies, Damned Lies, and “CFD Comparison Charts” – Part I
- Mechanical Analysis Products Now in Mentor’s Higher Education Program
- Sony Vaio laptop in mass ‘recall’