Amouiri Raouf There are various software alternatives for modeling thermofluid design applications, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Among the most common choices are:

1. Comsol Multiphysics: Comsol is a commercial program used for thermofluid simulations. It has several capabilities, such as heat transport, fluid dynamics, and structural mechanics. It also provides an easy-to-use interface and a number of add-on modules for specialty simulations.

2. ANSYS Fluent: Another commercial product that is commonly used in thermofluid simulations is ANSYS Fluent. It provides excellent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and heat transfer modeling capabilities. It also includes a diverse set of physical models, boundary conditions, and computational approaches.

3. OpenFOAM: OpenFOAM is a free, open-source program used in CFD simulations. It has several capabilities, such as fluid dynamics, heat transport, and mass transfer. It also has a big user and development community that may help with support and extra tools.

4. SimScale: SimScale is a cloud-based commercial product that provides a wide variety of thermofluid simulation features. It contains an easy-to-use interface and a number of add-on modules for specialty simulations.

5. Simcenter: Simcenter is another another commercial program that provides a wide variety of thermofluid simulation features. It also has additional simulation features, such as electromagnetic and multiphysics simulations.

6. Python, R, and Wolfram Mathematica are general-purpose programming languages that may be used to create thermofluid simulation scripts and applications. They are frequently used alongside other simulation tools, such as OpenFOAM or ANSYS Fluent.

What software to employ together is entirely dependent on the exact situation and amount of complexity. For example, if the problem is complicated and necessitates specialist skills, such as multiphysics simulations, employing software such as Comsol may be the best option. If the problem is simple and simply requires basic CFD simulations, software such as OpenFOAM or SimScale may suffice.

Generally speaking, closed source software offers technical support and updates during the life of the product, unlike open-source software where you will have to work collaboratively with other users to improve the service. But deciding which type of software is best for you depends largely on your technical expertise or available resources for maintaining and updating the software.

The most popular software used currenty by a lot of resesrchers related to fluid problems is the ansys fluent software.

For closed source software, I would give ANSYS a go. Quite beginner friendly too and the documentation is easily accessible from the internet. For open source software, I would recommend OpenFOAM due to the availability of huge libraries for multitude of problems. However, in research environment, I would prefer open source rather than closed source and would incline the latter in industrial setting.

• The best software currently used in thermo_fluid problems is the ansys fluent software, and Solidwork simulation.

It often depends on your specific application. Some simulation tools will not necessarily cover the physics you want to simulate, or you have to supply your own model/equations (which is no easy task). I personally like using SimScale. Since it's in the cloud, you don't need any hardware (except a very simple laptop and an internet connection) and can simulate from anywhere. You can see which thermophysical fluid models SimScale simulates here: https://www.simscale.com/docs/simulation-setup/materials/thermophysical-fluid-models/

I have tried to solve fluid problems in past 3 years with: Comsol, Fluent and Matlab, so I will provide better insight on each of them.

COMSOL: best choice if you deal NOT only with fluid dynamics, but also with several other physics. It is based on Finite Element Method and the solution process usually requires lots of RAM (the higher the number of degrees of freedom in your Model, the higher the amount of RAM required; the increase is more than linear...).

Comsol is also very useful for CFD when combined with topological optimization (once, i tried to optimize a micromixer geometry by coupling topological optimization algorithms with CFD, and in 2D it looks great).

FLUENT: MY best choice; if you deal only with fluids (non-Newtonian included) this is the fastest software in terms of convergence. It has a lot of build-in rheological models, but you can also program yours through user-defined-functions).

It is also very simple when modeling heat transfer (also with viscous heating included, very important especially when dealing with polymer flows) and multiphase.

In addition, there are tons of resources, especially on YouTube.

Fluent lacks a viscoelastic interface... so you have to move to other software (e.g., OpenFoam has a solver for viscoelastic fluids).

MATLAB: too heavy to implement complex flow problems; very good when interfaced with Comsol (there is a LiveLink through which You can run simulations through Matlab GUI... very useful especially for post-processing).

Best regards,

AP