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Powerful, Easy to Use CFD Tool
April 26, 2018

Powerful, Easy to Use CFD Tool

Erika Boeing | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SimScale

We are primarily using the CFD functions in SimScale in order to test out several new designs for wind energy generation. It has been critical in formulating several new early design concepts.
  • Amazing support team to help with modeling and troubleshooting
  • Database of example projects is great for gaining ideas on how different scenarios can be modeled within the tool
  • Affordable CFD tool - with computing done in the cloud it allows for complicated modeling to be done without expensive equipment!
  • The browser interface is much more intuitive and faster to learn and use than many other CFD tools. Significantly easier than OpenFOAM, which is its backend.
  • Great training for new users
  • The computing functionality tops out at 32 cores, which is typically more than enough but has caused some limitations in the most complicated CFD scenarios that I wanted to model.
  • There have been a few pieces of open FOAM functionality (which is SimScale's CFD backend) that haven't yet been migrated into SimScale, so flexibility in modeling is slightly reduced from open FOAM. But this appears to be changing and evolving quickly.
  • The viewer for final analysis is somewhat limited. This is ok because the results can be downloaded and analyzed in full in Paraview, which is fully functional but takes more time than viewing in the browser window.
  • We've been able to iterate through a large number of designs more quickly than we would have without a CFD simulation, and also compared to the time it would have taken to prepare most other CFD simulations.
  • Affordable price, and it prevented us from needing to invest in expensive computing equipment.
  • Help from the support team also sped up the process of modeling different scenarios!
  • openfoam and ansys CFD
SimScale is much faster to spin up on than OpenFOAM. Ansys CFD tools are much more expensive! Both tools require expensive computing equipment to run, which SimScale does not!
SimScale is awesome for someone who wants to spin up and use CFD, FEA, or Thermal Modeling quickly and with a lot of support. It doesn't require Linux or specialized computing knowledge to use, unlike many other reasonably-priced options for CFD. It also gets rid of the need for expensive computing equipment as the computing is done completely in the cloud. If you are willing to make your models public, they also offer a free version which contributes to the public database of possible models. If you need to model something which needs to have a large amount of customization or requires very extensive computing capacity, SimScale is unlikely to be the best way to go.

SimScale Feature Ratings