March 2005, London, England

CD-adapco, the leading provider of CAD-embedded flow simulation solutions, has announced the release of the world's first fully integrated process for polyhedral CFD. The first official release of the STAR-CCM+ Box Set combines CD-adapco's technology leading STAR-CCM+ solver with STAR-Design, which is the world's first commercially available polyhedral mesher.

STAR-Design, CD-adapco's fully functional parametric solid modeler, allows polyhedral meshes to be created at the click of a button. Based on the same Parasolid kernel that powers many leading CAD packages, STAR-Design is both powerful and easily accessible. Using an intuitive interface, even a casual user can easily build, mesh and run an industrial strength CFD simulation. Using STAR-Design, polyhedral meshes can be easily generated from the created (or imported) CAD geometry at the click of a button.

Extensive validation has demonstrated that polyhedral meshes offer near hexahedral accuracy with all of the automatic meshing benefits of tetrahedra. Professor Milovan Peric, CD-adapco's Director of Technology, explains, “Recent tests have shown that, for equivalent or better accuracy, polyhedral meshes converge up to ten times faster than tetrahedra, typically delivering a speedup of 400 - 500%”, he says, "Polyhedral CFD delivers more for less: more accurate solutions, using fewer cells and ultimately greatly reduced human and computing resources"

Dr Dennis Nagy, CD-adapco's Vice President of Business Development, acknowledges that polyhedral meshing is the first payoff of CD-adapco's investment in solver technology. "While other CFD vendors are content to simply build upon their existing aging software architectures, with STAR-CCM+ we decided to go back to the drawing-board and build our solutions upon the most advanced technology currently available", says Dennis. “The arrival of polyhedral meshing represents a watershed for industrial CFD".

"I am confident that the arrival of our polyhedral meshing technology spells the end for tetrahedra as a useful tool for CFD", says CD-adapco President Steve MacDonald. "Tetrahedra - as well as the CFD codes which continue to rely on them - are doomed to become a thing of the past"

The STAR-CCM+ Virtual Box Set is available to existing CD-adapco customers from https://www2.cd-adapco.com/

If you are interested in joining the polyhedral revolution but are not currently a CD-adapco customer, you can download a trial version from

www.cd-adapco.com/products/CCMdemo.htm