Simulating a Turkey: Lessons in Speeding Up Simulation Projects
Like many of us, I’ve been “cooking” a turkey lately—but mine is a little different. It’s a simulated turkey. With the holidays around the corner, I wanted to test a thermal conduction model for an unrelated project, and a turkey seemed like the perfect stand-in. However, I found myself worried that the simulation wouldn’t be ready in time. That’s when I fell back on a set of tricks I often use to ensure simulation projects finish on schedule.
Whether you’re running a CFD analysis, thermal conduction model, or even stress simulations, these strategies can save you time and computing resources—without compromising accuracy where it matters. Let’s dig in.
When running simulations, accuracy is essential, but that doesn’t mean every detail needs to be hyper-realistic. In my case, I replaced the unnecessarily complex turkey geometry in my model with a sphere.
Yes, a sphere. Anyone familiar with the joke about "spherical chickens in a vacuum" will appreciate the humor here. While the sphere doesn’t look like a turkey, it captures the heat conduction patterns I needed to test while slashing computation time.
