In the August 2009 issue of R&D Magazine, I wrote about some of the trends that are affecting the development strategies of developers of scientific software. Consolidation, it seems, has become a major driver for companies such as COMSOL—known for its modeling capabilities—and Maple—known for its mathematics engine—to expand the abilities of their products in convergent directions. COMSOL is featuring more integration with CAD or CAE tools, for example, and Maple has added simulation software to its portfolio.
This trend, aided as it is by a customer base that wants simpler, easier-to-use software that is well integrated from concept to prototype, is readily apparent, vendors agree. But it by no means rules the industry. Just as in other sectors—from instrumentation to industrial supplies—there remains plenty of room for focused product lines. Take Tecplot of Bellevue, Wash., for example. The company, which is now known for its data visualization expertise, got its start as a spin-off from Boeing, developing computational fluid dynamics codes and algorithms. After many years in the CFD realm, the company, which had been dealing primarily with clients and customers in the aerospace regime, realized its core strength was in its complex data visualization tools.
As Mike Peery, CEO and co-founder of Tecplot, explains, “we initially started out with a fully integrated solution, but it turned out better for us to specialize. Why? Well, says Peery, applications are an important driver for the scientific software business and Tecplot’s primary customers in aerospace had a demanding set of needs that couldn’t be addressed by an all-in-one solution.
Aerospace is an excellent example of an industry that has not matured with respect to analysis software. Designers need such extraordinary complex flow diagrams that nobody does them very well yet, says Peery. Take the Boeing 787. In the effort to profile boundary layers and evaluate shocks in the transonic regime, designers soon found themselves trying to compute flows so complicated they hindered the ability of the computers to predict drag. Inaccuracies emerged in the form of not enough grid points. Numerical errors were introduced as a result, causing the boundary layers come out wrong.
“So here’s one large industry in the world where an integrated solution doesn’t work very well because the technology is not mature yet. It’s also expensive and requires sophisticated user training,” says Peery.
Another example is the oil and gas sector. “There will be huge perturbations in how simulations are done in the next five years,” Peery continues, for the purpose of predicting where in the ground oil and gas deposits will be. Accurate predictions alleviate some of the tremendous costs of retrieving the resource. The industry is moving from an old technology—Cartesian type grids—and into a new technology—polyhedral grids.
“CFD went through this 5-10 years ago when they moved from Cartesian grids to unconstructed grids,” says Peery.
Eventually, he says, aerospace will fall into the place of other mature technologies, and an integrated solution will start to make more sense. But the limitations of an all-in-one solution, he says, rules that out for the moment.
“An integrated solution lowers the bar for ease of use and more people can get into trouble more easily,” he says. “CFD is not a pushbutton solution.”
