One will not be canned for the other. It makes no sense. Fluent cannot takeover the CFX user base or vice versa. Neither of these routes is practical.

Things will be status quo for a while in terms of product development until a plan can be figured out. There are many issues to consider and plans will evolve over time. Nothing revolutionary will happen here in the coming months, so wait and see.

There already is a plan, and it is to do with multi-physics. Combination of magnetic, stress analsyis and CFD.

The first thing they will try to do is integrate FLUENT with their Stress Analysis package. To have a single interface for the customer for all CAE.

Unfortunately for all involved, this plan won't be fully realized for another 3-5 years.

Word. Totally agree. I love these "oh yeah, they'll just cut'n'paste some subroutines from one, a couple from the other and then badda bing badda boom we'll have a nice new software in 6mths". More likely to pick a platform and use the developers expertise to add to it. Still takes a lot of time though.

If history is anything to go by the end user won't see anything new for a couple of years. Heck the sale won't even be finalised until the summer.

BTW I moved to Montreal and went back to being a roadie homo. Riding a bunch of track too... even came down to London to ride the new velodrome there.

Bingo,

this is what matters....the money....

lets face it this is commercial CFD not science, the betterment of mankind, creating a better world....more exact algorithms for a specific problem

money.

Ansys has voted!!

Lets see what comes of it all....???

Hey Neale/Dan,

well if if solver architecture is an issue...parlez vouz fluent....

CFX-5, as you probably know struggled with sover archetecture infastructure for many releases and re-writes.....took years....lost all kinds of potential customers...hence the 23/~550k ratio on purchase price!!

For adding capabilities for multiphase problems for example, CFX did full re-writes.....fluent added an index to the domains structure??? Yep CFX all coupled up can do some problems better....but look how long it took to get it to market!!!

Core solver technology for constant or near constant propery flows...yes much better solver with the pressure based coupled solver techonlogy for steady problems....no argument...other stuff....think again...

just my oppinion!!

Regards......guess ;-)

Hey Ian...

are they still letting Robin speak for the company...???

I thought there was a memo about that stuff....way back when...what was it...he confused staggered and segregated......some stuff against Star.....cus he read the manual????

how much does that cost a company.....???

Oh well it is a cfd forum....I think the money is reading something else??

Ta... guess ;-)

Just Wondered how much CFX is worth now ?? or should I say would be worth if it was a separate company. $20 - 25 million is talked about - but that was a while back, and we all realise that ANSYS picked it up at a bargin price. However all the major development had been done (at what cost) and as I read it CFX has been doing very well lately. Dare I say it taking over from Star's 2nd Position in the Market ????

Another question. Does anyone see any advantages of maintaining 2 brands in the market place ? Obviously this would have to be the case for a while but what of long term. Does offering choice have any advantages ?

CFX have been doing well, largely driven by a very very cheap pricing policy, I dont think they have taken second place now and I think this buy out could really hit them hard (and possibly fluent too) as there will be a lot of uncertainty as to the future of the code and also if it is going to be merged or killed off. After all who wants to invest time and money in a product that could concievably not be around in 2-3 years time.

I think Ansys will bild up a great puzzle with the useful features of Fluent an CFX. Ansys already did this with CFX and Workbench. Haven't you ever heard about "modules"? For example there will be a module with the CFX fetures for Turbomachinery and a Fluent module for combustion. There won't be the problem of the integration of the two solvers. The big match is to understand if the name "CFX" will persist or not. In my opinion the number of clients that Fluent has let immagine that CFX will disappear (externally!). Have a nice day!

Mica

From Market point of view, CFX is way behind STAR-CD. Do you have any figure regarding exact annual turnover of CFX? STAR-CD is around $75-80 millions.

John, Wow I didn't realise it was that much. It would be interesting to see the figures for the other code manufacturers. From what I have herd /picked up on, Star have had to undertake what CFX went through some years back with the complete re-write.

I heard Ansys bought Fluent solely to get you back on the payroll

"Ansys already did this with CFX and Workbench. Haven't you ever heard about "modules"?"

Not quite. Ansys dropped Patran (as a basis for Build) like a hot potato for the obvious reason that they didn't want to pay royalties to their major FEA competitor (MSC). The mesher is a seperate module written by GE that was simply hooked into Patran and then re-hooked into Workbench. As for the other "modules"; Turbogrid was already being re-written with ICEM as a base before the aqcuisition and it took BladeGen 3 years to get a WorkBench GUI.

Yes, I didn't intend that everything is in the workbench environment, but that you can buy separately the modules. For example you can buy the CFX basic solver and add the MFR license and in the same way you can buy the CFXMESH (the GE mesher) or Icem Tetra or Hexa or both. I think this procedure will be adopted also for the Fluent products, without re-writing the code, eventually modifing the Gui and set up everything in the workbench environment. The customer will be able to buy, for example the preprocessor of CFX and the Fluent solver for combustion, or something like that. In any case this is an opinion of mine, only time will tell what will happen!

Yes, the CFX-5 solver was written (not rewritten), once, from the ground up. So were the GUIs, i.e. written once from the ground up. This project mainly resulted from the required product transition of CFX-4/TASCflow to CFX-5 as well as needing to support unstructured grids. CFX-4 and TASCflow were also becoming unmaintainable so a new development platform was needed. What is there now in CFX-5 is a completely maintainable platform.

In the end though who cares how long the software took to come into it's own. The important thing is how it works today. Dwelling in the past gets you nowhere.

I don't understand what your comment about constant property flows or "other stuff" is supposed to mean. Pretty nebulous. These days I'd put CFX up against anybody, any day, anytime.

I definitely agree with you about the original price ratio. When CFX was purchased by ANSYS it was still not making money. AEA spent a lot of dollars funding the writing of CFX-5 and sold CFX to ANSYS at a bargain.

I'm sorry you simply jumped ship before things got really interesting.

Yes, that's right. It will be status quo for a while yet. CFD customers tend to not like revolutionary change.

Things are still pretty good with me. Started with a decent girlfriend, then wife and house, now a kid, la la la life goes on. Get on your mountain bike and go over to Bromont sometime in the summer. You will be satisfied. I ride there now and then.

That would be a natural plan I suppose. Integration of CFX in to workbench as well as FSI projects have been on going on for 3 years now. Fluent will probably go through a similar process, taking a similar amount of time.

What is more interesting is what will happen on the core solver front. ANSYS already has a project to unify all the meshing technology. Will that kind of project happen for the solvers now?? You would think so as there more solvers than meshers now and we don't need to develop all of them.

If ANSYS decides to unify solvers, one thing for sure will happen. A lot of time and resource will be burned in this process, which leaves less chance to improve code itself and add new features.

Bromont rocks. That's where the velodrome is for me, but I did ride the MTB there once. It was ace, but a bit limited because they were blasting some ski hills at the time.

Now you've procreated you're equalling Shannon on the Darwin scale according to Jerry's theory. Me too

Later

Yep, the money doesn't read CFD-Online.... nor does it pick a solver on what makes the most sense from a development perspective. It picks it on what makes the most money. Short term. Financial results are quarterly.

This is unlike when AEA bought ASC years ago and continued with both codes because they rarely competed or went head to head. Fluent and CFX are direct competitors. I'm still baffled at this purchase.