My love story with CFD

People end up loving CFD due to several reasons and several situations. For me, the main ignition for my burning desire towards CFD is during my part time job at Osaka University towing tank. I have been more of a control and robotics guy before this moment.

I was born in a small town in Myanmar called Aunglan. During my childhood, robots have been my dream technology. And naturally we worked on an underwater robot (it’s more of ROV with a remote rather than a robot). We failed terribly and I decided to study more about underwater robotics in Osaka University. I applied for the Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering (NAOE) graduate course at Osaka University and got accepted (thanks to my late Professor Kato. Rest in peace, professor).

BUT I didn’t get the Japanese government scholarship (the de facto ticket for your graduate studies in Japan). I needed money and one of the professors in NAOE department gave me a part time job at Osaka University towing tank. The job was simple. I needed to help their research by running the towing tank carriage and logging the data. Sometimes, I had to enter the model ship storage pool and pull out the hulls (Believe me, you don’t want to do this in winter).

Anyway, I enjoyed the job! I was really amazed by how the free-surface at the bow and the wake patterns changed at different Froude numbers and different hull shapes and also how PIV was used. At the same time, some of the researchers in that lab were computing similar hulls and occasionally presenting their work. It is very exciting to see computers being able to accurately replicate experiment results I helped. I was very SOLD by CFD! This is where my CFD life began.

As a Master student, I was a bit free except a lot of homework. I studied CFD and tried to help the associate professor by computing the flow around the hydrofoils used in the underwater robots of my lab using OpenFOAM (actually I was just replacing mesh in airfoil tutorial with that of our hydrofoils and changing the fluid properties and boundary conditions. And the associate professor was very happy with the results). Then, one day, I told my professor that I wanted to change topic to resistance calculations for underwater robots using CFD rather than control algorithms. My professor was a bit shocked  but he agreed with my decision for the CFD part and transferred me to the associate professor who is a CFD expert.

However, the domain was not underwater robots. It was tsunami protection systems! And unfortunately (or fortunately), the Ansys license for our lab was expired and I needed to use a free solution and I began to learn and use OpenFOAM seriously. At the same time, I realized the importance of free open source solutions towards universities and students. It was in late 2013. Dr. Joel Guerrero’s OpenFOAM lectures in University of Genoa carried me through the steep learning curve of OpenFOAM. They have not even spinned off as WolfDynamics from UniGe at that time. I am always grateful to those tutorials since those PDF files literally gave me a Master’s and a PhD.

Fast forward, it’s been over a decade since my first serious CFD run. I have carried out simulations on underwater robots, tsunamis and dolphin swimming as well as vortex induced vibrations, etc. during my stay in Osaka University as a graduate student as well as a specially appointed researcher. Then after that, I have been working for my current employee and worked on CFD simulations of various industrial problems.

As I became more fascinated by CFD and OpenFOAM, I began to spend my free time at home playing around with various problems with different geometries and meshes and solvers. I am still learning and everyday I may learn something new.

And then, I began to use LinkedIn and started to share whatever I learned. I got connected with a lot of very smart and very nice people around the world also working on various engineering problems. I am definitely not at the top of this CFD world (far far far away) but I am enjoying this journey. And I also love the idea of open source CFD enabling several students and engineers with whatever research they want to carry out, democratizing R&D for everybody (I was fascinated by EXPERIQS CEO Dr. Sooraj Padinjattayil’s words).

I love CFD…