Comment by knolan
5 years ago
I love this idea. The best way to get academics to buy in would be to have some clear outcome such as a publication or funding opportunity.
There are a lot of clunky engineering tools that would benefit greatly from professional software development. Computational Fluid Dynamics software in particular is just plain awful in terms of usability for beginners.
What are the names of some of this software that are a good example of in-use but are clunky/have awful usability? I ask because it sounds like an interesting area, and I would like to see for myself what you're working with.
On one hand there is Ansys. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a software suite for numerical simulation comprising several tools that have been acquired over the years. It’s frightfully expensive and there’s no incentive to make it more usable as there’s limited competition.
Then there’s OpenFOAM which is a fantastic open source alternative. It’s entirely command line based but there are UI derivatives and cloud based versions (SimScale). However it’s a nightmare of disjointed code, difficult to build and heavy on dependencies. You spend all your time dealing with endless problems related to defining simple geometries in the basic BlockMesh tool and then dealing with and compiling various solvers. It’s a research grade tool and not a polished piece of software. I won’t go into the various versions with incompatible differences.
Getting the most basic stuff working is tedious and frustrating in both.
After a few years of this masochism you just get on with it. However, when you are trying to guide students through the software for their final year project they spend about two thirds of their time just figuring out how to get something simple running and then never want to touch CFD ever again.
Then there’s Blender where I can install it in seconds and set up a simple flow simulation with a straightforward workflow. Sure the result is not remotely accurate but that’s just the solver, there is no reason for the complexity of the workflow in Ansys or OpenFOAM other than it was designed by (Mechanical) Engineers who know nothing about good software design.
Thanks for the info! Heh, if Blender is your only go to alternative for ease of simulations and usability, then there's definitely a need for improvement.
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