Hello All,

Does any one know about any commercial CFD codes which does not use the FVM technique?

Regards Anantha

there are some products by fluent, may be polyflow, it uses fem

I assume you mean general purpose commercial CFD.

FIDAP was fully FEM but it is not developed by ANSYS anymore.

Polyflow uses FEM but it is not general purpose.

ANSYS CFX is a half way house of CVFEM.

Not sure about others. Not many others matter these days since the market is so dominated by ANSYS.

Hi,

There are also some fundamentally different codes which use lattice Boltzmann method and other related methods. I think the main player in this field is EXA (www.exa.com) but I have not idea how good it is and have never used it.

Glenn Horrocks

Hello All,

Thanks for your responses. In fact even I have heard of the products from Exa, though not really aware of its functionalities. There is a brief description about that in their website. But as far as FEM and FVM codes are concerned, is there any inherent advantages or disadvantages for these? I understand that FVM is more physical in nature since the physical conservation principle is directly visible in it.

Regards Anantha

Hi,

Both the FEM and FVM method, correctly applied should give accurate results. The basis of FVM is control volumes so you are calculating mass, momentum and energy enterign and leaving the cell so it is just a little easier to understand what is happening under the hood compared to FEM which has a layer of mathematical abstraction, being that it uses the integral form of the equations.

Glenn Horrocks