Leading Provider of Fluid Simulation Technologies Breaks "Design, Build, Test" Product Development Cycle with Early-Stage Testing Tool

March 8, 2005, Lebanon, NH, USA

Fluent Inc., the worldwide leader in computational fluid dynamics, will preview FloWizard V2 for audiences at the National Design Show, NDES, in Chicago, part of National Manufacturing Week in the U.S. The preview will be held on Tuesday, March 8th in room N126 of the show’s North Hall.

FloWizard V2 builds on the success of the product’s 2004 debut, furthering Fluent’s goal of bringing the power of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to a wider engineering audience. FloWizard V2 combines the ease of use of a wizard interface with the powerful FLUENT 6.2 fluid simulation engine. The result is a solution that can help engineers test conceptual designs at the earliest stages of the product development cycle providing the benefit of discovering design flaws early in the process thus improving quality, time to market, and reducing large downstream manufacturing costs.

"Where CFD has been traditionally restricted to high fidelity complex modeling, FloWizard now also brings fluid and airflow simulation to all stages in the product design process," said Paul Bemis, Vice President of Marketing at Fluent. "By introducing testing earlier in the product design process, FloWizard is breaking the ‘design, build, test’ cycle that still permeates the engineering culture—in an ideal world testing should be done throughout the product design process. CFD can actually be an extremely helpful tool for validating design concepts before they’re committed to. FloWizard makes this possible."

FloWizard V2 introduces several new features, including support for Fluent’s RSolve computing service, which allows FloWizard calculations to be run remotely on Fluent’s large parallel computing cluster from anywhere in the world. This Web-based access to Fluent’s remote simulation facility brings supercomputer performance to the design engineer’s desktop, freeing up her workstation for other tasks.

FloWizard V2 also offers CAD integration features that will benefit ProEngineer, UniGraphics, SolidWorks, and Solid Edge users. Designs created using these tools can now be read directly without translation to intermediate, generic CAD file formats. Additional new CAD file import formats are CATIA V5, NASTRAN, PATRAN, and ANSYS, ensuring compatibility with all major CAE software.

Additional enhancements in FloWizard V2 are compressible flow physics, heat exchanger models, and new post-processing features including iso-surfaces, arbitrary plane cuts, and point probes. This extends the range of problems that can be analyzed by designers.

First released in 2004, FloWizard is Fluent’s revolutionary, general-purpose computational fluid dynamics software for design engineers. FloWizard’s unique interface was created based on extensive usability studies at major corporations. It aims to make the use of CFD amongst designers just as easy and common as CAD software is today.

FloWizard has been adopted in industrial corporations worldwide as the CFD standard in their design departments. By simulating a product’s fluid flow characteristics earlier in the design process, FloWizard users need fewer physical prototypes, identify optimum designs sooner, and increase the efficiency of their design and engineering process. Break-through features of FloWizard V1 included "guide me" features; collaboration; automatic geometry clean up and meshing; flow volume extraction; a fully automated CFD model setup and solution process; and automated post-processing, data extraction and report generation.

FloWizard V2 is expected to ship in the second quarter of 2005. For information on product configuration and pricing please contact a Fluent sales representative ( Phone: (603) 643-2600 in the U.S.) or visit the FloWizard website for your local contact: www.flowizard.com. About Fluent

Fluent is the world's largest provider of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software and consulting services. Fluent's software is used for simulation, visualization, and analysis of fluid flow, heat and mass transfer, and chemical reactions. It is a vital part of the computer-aided engineering (CAE) process for companies around the world and is deployed in nearly every manufacturing industry. Using Fluent's software, product development, design and research engineers build virtual prototypes and simulate the performance of proposed and existing designs, allowing them to improve design quality while reducing cost and speeding time to market. Fluent's corporate headquarters are located in Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA, with offices in Belgium, England, France, Germany, India, Italy, China, Japan and Sweden. Its CFD software is also available around the world through joint ventures, partnerships, and distributors in Korea, Australia, Brazil, China, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, Middle East, and most European countries.

FLUENT® is a registered trademark of Fluent Inc. For more information, contact:

Jennifer Correa Fluent Inc. 10 Cavendish Court Lebanon, NH 03766 (603) 643-2600 Ext. 668 jrc@fluent.com