A typical reader

Hey there 👋

It’s Robin from CFD Engine & I’ve got the headlines from the little survey I posted a couple of weeks ago.

Nothing heavy, just a few observations – play along & see if you’re “a typical reader.”

I had hoped more of you would be on Mac (like me) but I’ll not hold it against you 😉

Anyway, on to some more interesting results…

Some context

The whole point of this exercise was to get an idea of the tools you use (& how often you use them) versus the tools I use (& write about).

This should help me to align things & make better, more applicable content 🤞

I’ve been digging through the responses & this is my 3-minute executive summary.

Bear in mind that most readers didn’t respond to the survey & this is based on the answers from just over 10% of you.

Headlines

I listed a load of code, tools, operating systems etc & asked if you used them “all the time”, occasionally or never. From that data I reckon…

You’re probably using…

OpenFOAM · ParaView · Scripting (Python & Shell) · snappyHexMesh · Git · Linux & Windows

You’re probably not using…

AWS · Docker · MeshLab · Meshmixer · Rhino · Grasshopper · cfMesh · Gmsh · Dakota · pyFoam · pyVista or a Mac

You might be using…

Blender · FreeCAD · Salome · VS Code

Your favourite OpenFOAM flavour

Almost all of the OpenFOAM users indicated their preferred release:

just over half of you use an ESI/OpenCFD release;
one third of you use a Foundation release;
8% use something else (spread across Helyx, TCAE, TotalSim, Icon, foam-extend, SimScale or something custom).

For the Windows users, most had OpenFOAM installed under Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Model Size & Core Count

The biggest model was ~200M cells & the largest core count was 2048 – “interestingly” the biggest model didn’t use the largest core count 🤔

However…

You’re almost certainly solving less than 30M cells (& it’s quite likely that you’re actually solving less than 12M)…

Chart of how many cells the respondents usually used in their models

Similarly, you’re probably solving on less than 64 cores (& it may well be less than half of that)…

Chart of how many cores the respondents usually solved on

Bits & Bobs

I left a space to suggest any tools that I’d missed. There wasn’t a clear winner here but…

To my friends using commercial codes (CAD, solvers & meshers) – I see you 👀 I’m not well placed to write about these, but I see you (especially my red-edge chasing ANSA friends).

To my vim friend – if you’re in Neovim, I recommend checking this out.

And to my Plasticity friend, that email is on it’s way 🙌

So what?

So what am I going to do with these “insights”?

I’m going to stick with the same primary content.

I’ll focus on OpenFOAM (mainly the ESI/OpenCFD/.com flavour) along with ParaView, scripting & any interesting cross-platform tools that I think you’ll dig.

I’ll keep in mind the cell & core counts & I won’t be scaling everything to the moon.

I’ll do fewer Rhino, AWS & Docker emails (although I still use, & recommend, all three).

I’ll look into Blender & FreeCAD a bit more, the user interfaces scare me, but we’ll see how we get on.

Any comments? Any surprises? Are you a typical reader? Let me know, I won’t tell anyone 🤫

Until next week, stay safe,