Hello.

I have some experience in FLUENT. Can somebody compare the capabilities of CFX or Star-CD with FLUENT? For example:

- The advantages and disadvantages of each one? - Which one is more user-friendly? - Which areas of fluid mechanics and heat transfer, each of them is strong in? - Do they have a good pre and post processor? - Do they have good support team? - Their User-Defined-Functions

Thank you, Mazyar

I don't know Star-CD, but between CFX and FLUENT, I consider FLUENT more user-friendly, maybe because I use it more.

Models are almost the same in both code, but FLUENT solver is, in my opinion, more powerful.

Pre-processing in FLUENT is really easy. You create your geometry and mesh in a CAD-like environment (GAMBIT). Postprocessing is integrated in the solver, and allows you to manipulate graphs and to do simple data analysis.

Look for more information using Google. I read a comparison article where features were compared, some month ago.

Hi

ap.

Well it really depends on the range of problems you are expected to solve. I know for me, and our CFD group in general, we need the vast amount of different models contained in Fluent. The wide variety of models available allows us to solve almost any kind of problem, within reason. It's very easy to add your own custom code through the UDF's, and post-processing can be done quickly as it is intergrated within the the solver. Basically I would say that for us, it would take a hell of alot to pursuade us to switch to another package.

I agree almost on everything with Anton, but adding functions to FLUENT is not always easy.

UDF are good for many tasks, but have limitations and, above all, documentation should be improved.

Hi

ap

UDF killed me, I had to write up to 500 lines of program, and some macros didn't work perfectly, and help group were confused as well, also as AP told the documentation is not quite comprehensive, so that you may find sometimes some macros in the samples while never described before.

hi everyone,

I agree everything above with you. Since I have experience both on fluent and on StarCD, especially on massive computation, I would like to add a piece of comparison between them.

By my own experience, starcd can converge more quickly than fuent in some cases of internal flow, if the mesh is the same(for example, created by ICEM) and well designed. It seems that StarCD has some advantages over fluent on internal flow and hex grid. One of my friends with much experience on StarCD has the similiar opinions.

However, when it come to the friendly GUI, UDF and etc, I think, fluent is the first. Although you can find in *.h files detailed definitions of all macroes used in UDFs, it is impossible to know how to use them because there are no explanations.

Hi,

echoing anton's sentiments, it would take a heck of a lot to make our CFD group to change from fluent. most of our work is in transient compressible aerodynamics. we have had experiance to evaluate all three packages quite throughly. for most of our work we have found fluent to be the package to use, the lack of a coupled solver as part of CD's offering hurts quite a bit when it comes to modeling flows that have shocks in them. segregated solver on star cd tends to smear the shocks a lot. in terms of user friendliness, fluent and cfx are miles ahead of STAR. maybe the new offering from star will address these issues (pro-am i.e). the end of the day of the day it simply comes down to what u intend to use the package for, educational purposes? then i would suggest to go with fluent or cfx. its quite easy to teach ppl to use the code(s).

cheers nandu