i'm a student of chemical engg. at IIT Delhi, and i am currently considering a career in CFD. is there anybody who could please counsel me a little on the subject, i need to know about what kind of jobs are available in CFD, who are the market leaders (globally and in India both), and do u need to be a Ph.D., and also do u necessarily have to have programming skills, and also could someone please give me a brief over-view of what kind of industrial problems can be modelled using CFD, and what limitations are there in the existing software packages...etc. It would be a great help if someone could give me a market analysis, and a little theoretical background on their own, but if u can't it would still be a lot of help if u could tell me some useful links...i'm looking for specific names of companies, as far as the market analysis part is considered, and also a little bit about the kind of money they make....please send ur replies to my e-mail id : rk_299@yahoo.com, or post a message at this site whichever is convenient to u. thankyou.

Many questions! I'll give a few quick answers:

CFD Jobs - check out the CFD Jobs Database. It currently contains about 100 open CFD positions - several are in India.

Application areas - see my posts in the in the discussion thread from Mar 27 entitled "prognoses".

Market leaders - Fluent is the largest commercial vendor. After Fluent comes CFX and CD adapco. There are many other companies though - see the sponsor list for CFD Online, it containts more than 20 companies working on CFD related things. You can find even more companies in the Company section of the home-page databse here at CFD Online. CFD also has a very large in-house side. Much CFD work in aerospace companies is still done with in-house codes.

Programming skills - necessary if you want to develop CFD codes. Useful but not absolutely necessary if you just want to use CFD codes for solving engineering problems.

CFD limitations - impossible to give a short answer to. You might want to check out the CFD Introductions in the Resources/Misc section. Escpecially the MARNET Best Practise Guidelines are nice and includes a bit on limitations etc.

Market analysis - CFD is a quickly growing sector. The growth rate has been reduced a bit in the wake of the dot.com crash but on average the CFD sector has grown about 20% annualy over the last 5-10 years or so.

Money - CFD is like any other "high-end" engineering discipline.