Hi Robert01,
Yes, it’s very challenging’ to achieve a successful simulation at the start and even with some experience.
One ‘successful’ simulation is just that, by leaving a simulation to run its full course to the End time.
If you are monitoring the simulation and you can see a lack of acceptable convergence plots and/or from the results area then cancellation of the simulation allows you to start over and rethink your setup.
Simscale have put considerable financial resources into significantly simplifying the simulation FEA/CFD world, having said that, it’s still not easy to achieve successful simulations. I’ve generally found the Step by step tutorial very helpful, but again, still challenging when trying to apply to a new model/situation.
Following the economies of scale concept, savings in past development costs gained by an increased level of users may eventually drive Simscale prices down as they gain more fee paying clients from new and other older CFD/FEA software companies. If Simscale continues on its journey to increase the simplification and ease of simulation use, the user base will grow wider and quicker. They are also increasing the breadth of the total product.
When you look at other longer established FEA/CFD packages they are faced with considerably legacy issues that make beginners & commercial companies lose interest almost immediately, due to the idiosyncrasies of those packages. Growing Simscale’s market share with ‘easy to use’ FEA/CFD will eventually lead to price reductions as past development costs and current operating costs are spread across an increasing fee paying user base. Simply put, grow the user base within a competitive market drives prices down.
Fusion 360 is currently on a somewhat similar journey of growing its user base, being originally totally free as it ironed out bugs with the community and now free with some restrictions or with low fees. Autodesk produced Fusion 360, a non-legacy software (S/W) package that has gained exceptional traction with new users and is now pulling older users away from established S/W due to lower pricing from a growing user base. It’s now enticing customer to upgrade from its free Tinker cad towards the free version or the low fee paying Fusion 360 version. At one time it had FEA included free but this has been sliced off. Simscale had a wider free offering originally, with compressible flow free as well as it pushed out into the market, but operational costs attributed to user question would have been high, so now we get a taste of the products that have less user issues, given increased complexity of compressibility.
I’d like to see a suite of small packages, for FEA, or CFD …etc, but unless you are totally into FEA that is not available. When you have come from seeing your first handheld calculator at age 14 (1973) & using 286 & 386 - 16Mhz machines, dot matrix b/w printers, & Strand5 at university it’s an amazing world provided by Simscale, even if its just for a taste of what you can do.
Well that how I see it, my brief look into the world of simulation offerings and pricing 