It is very challenging to be a CFD beginner. Coming from a different background and not being an engineer, I personally can relate to all of our beginner-level users.
You often feel as if you need a booklet, something like „CFD for dummies“. And when you luckily discover there already is a book with that title, your luck rapidly fades away, as soon as you realize CFD is a tradable instrument on the stock exchange as well. That is not what you had in mind in the first place. Search engines believe that even the fashion industry has something to do with CFD. And all you want is to know something more about the exciting area of computational fluid dynamics, confusingly abbreviated as CFD.
It is even worse if someone, especially elderly people asks you what you do for a living. Guys from Simulation Hub did an excellent example of how to effectively explain it, in a blog post called “Solving Everyday Problem using Simulation Technology”.
An excellent online place for exchanging questions is cfd-online.com, as the largest user forum for CFD issues. If you are interested in CFD companies, you should definitely check the CFD review. A good place to start trying open-source tools is a site called sourceforge.net. Pointwise’s blog “Another Fine Mesh” is not active anymore but you can still see its archive. Moreover, the guys from CFD support published a list of OpenFOAM-friendly software.
From my own experience, humans, as visually driven living beings, tend to react well to beautiful colorful pictures. You can follow the hashtag #SimulationFriday on Twitter for visually compelling examples. That is why we created one of our most popular Pinterest boards named “CFD & simulation in everyday life”. Even my aunt enjoys this part of CFD. It is amazing to see you can simulate almost anything or anyone in this world:
Or something for more experienced users:
To be able to present ourselves successfully to various administrative institutions, we have also created a short brochure called “CFD for beginners”.
Furthermore, in order to help our users, we at Creative Fields have several ways to help you at any time or at any place:
- On our webpage, you can find a Learning Centre with various training materials.
- You can join our Facebook group cfMesh and share your meshing issues with the growing number of its members.
- If you prefer some other form of social media, we are also present on major social media channels, just scroll below to find the links.
We are looking forward to your feedback!
NOTE: the post was updated in August 2023, since some of the original links do not exist anymore.
