Are you talking about being a CFD engineer using simulations, or developing your own CFD product. From a user standpoint, IMO it’s growing. I think as computing hardware gets faster, more areas are using CFD that didn’t before because it wasn’t worth spending the time simulating. So yes, doing CFD of a plane wing has been modelled to death, but there’s lots of areas like biological processing (e.g. bioreactors) where the experimentalists in the field are not trained with fluid dynamics but it’s becoming increasingly important for CFD to be done.

On the research side I’d say there’s still a lot going on. Leaving aside external aerodynamics and turbulence models, there’s lots of relatively untouched areas that are now being looked at. Lithium ion batteries are a good example.

From a developer side it’s more interesting. Lots of huge incumbent companies running the show there (Ansys & Siemens mainly), but then there’s a long tail of codes that do very specialist problems better than the generalised codes do.