Prompted by a recent thread which I found surprising. What are peoples experiences of the support provided by the main CFD companies? Has anyone purchased support from a body other than the main CFD company and been pleased with the service?

Most of the time support has been good. I have personal experience from a few different vendors. Sometimes it can take some time before your questions reach those who really know the answers, but once in contact with the more experienced support staff their help has always been good and knowledgeable.

I've never seen any need to buy support from a third party. Frankly, I don't see that anyone but the vendor could provide the support you need - help with sorting out bugs etc.

Hi Jonas and Andy,

I agree that updates on patches, bugs, beta features, etc is a CFD vendor territory. However there is something missing sometimes....since the vendor always wants to sell some more software.

Think of it like your car dealer vs a local mechanic...maybe??? It is still morning so not sure if this is a good analogy??? ;-)

Anyhow if all you ever do is go to the dealer they usually cost more and then along the road really want to set you up with a brand new expensive ride. There are times when another option is good. Maybe even a guy who sees all different brands or cars??

I am thinking aloud here so bear with me.

Comments????..........Bak_Flow

i mainly use fluent and rarely trouble my fluent support, though two three times i had to trouble them and had really good experience, for example last week i had problem with gambit , it failed to mesh some face, so my superier asked them what could be wrong, their reply was something like this:

you should use tgrid as gambit is weak software.

you should not use gambit for mesh sizes more than 2 million cells for this case too i should use tgrid.

well for both the things i kept thinking if gambit is go useless compared to tgrid, why fluent spend so much time developing this, second why i shall not use gambit for more than two million cells when i have already done meshes of cells nearly 4 million cells and last mesh was 6.4 million cells.

in all they never tell you the solution of you problem they will always ask you to somethign different then you are doing, (if i ask about a problem in gambit tell me a solution or say we do not know, domp suggest another softwares).

finally i found out that the problem was in iges import (the face was distorted a bit).

my conclusion is if you are not able to solve your problem ask it on this discussion forum, if you remain lucky some one will help you, otherwise its very unlikely that you will get some real help from support(fluent support at least).

Perhaps I misunderstood the CFDRC thread but my reading was that their software was no longer being provided with the traditional support for a mainstream CFD package. Can someone confirm/deny that this is the case?

Support at the usual mainstream CFD level is obviously a substantial cost but I would not expect many large industrial customers for CFD to accept support at a low level.

I have received perfectly acceptable support from a third party for CFD related software including how to get round bugs in the software. They must have communicated with the authors of the software to log bug reports but it did not add an unacceptable time delay. The company was mainly a consultancy but also distributed and supported some engineering software.

Hi Andy,

Ever since the spin-off of CFDRC software, ESI-CFD is providing complete support for CFDRC's traditional softwares and more.

It takes some time to transition the technical expertise/management to a new organization, so there could very well have been a few glitches in the process.

I can see some situations where 3rd party support might be faster, but for most practical CFD related problems I would agree with Jonas's comments that the software vendor is in the best position to provide support for the software he wrote. Supporting CFD and maintaining a car are not quite a similar task.