[Dertengo]

I am not sure how FLOEFD is positioned. Is it STAR-CCM with less bells and whistles for CAD? All the marine problems seem to be addressed only in STAR-CCM yet FLOEFD seems to be capable of evaluating drag under steady state conditions.

[CFDfan]

I am very far away from the marine application of CFD, so can't give you an educated answer. I just kbow that there is a CFD company called Numeca (which apparently was recently aquired by Cadence) specilising in Marine. I don't know however how good it is and how it compares with StarCCM, Fluent, Comsol, Flowefed, etc general purpose codes

https://www.numeca.com/product/fine-marine

[Boris_M]

Hello Dertengo,

Well that depends on what you are trying to solve. If you are looking into CFD tools, it is less about Industry but more about the application and physics you are trying to resolve. Reason is that of course every code is capable of being used in the marine industry, the question however is what you are trying to solve in particular as marine is everything from electronics for ship's navigation system to flow around a submarine and free movement of a ship on the water or the sail fluttering of a sailboat in the wind when it makes a turn before the sail becomes taut again.

Simcenter FLOEFD is built for design engineers and with that, it needs to be usable and stable without the need for much numerical knowledge and complex meshing tasks which are not the job for a design engineer. So a designer wants to get results in a short time to make key design decisions. This of course limits the codes capabilities as design engineers will have little undrstanding on the complex combustion process in an internal combustion engine. So there is no need to have such physics if it makes the definition so much more complex where you have to pick from multiple reaction models or so. The same goes for physics which will make the convergence of the solver difficult and you need more access to numerical parameters you can modify to make the solver converge.
So there are limitations defined by the user persona for the product which will simply never do such cases and those by the methods used in the code. For example Siemens' Nextflow is a SPH (Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics) code which are naturally benefitial for complex fluid motion such as free surface or complex geometry movements which would require complex meshing tasks or constant remeshing of the model for every time step.

As for Simcenter STAR-CCM+, it is an analyst code and pretty much the jack of all trades but it will also have limitations if you look at highly specialized applications where there are maybe specific codes such as Simcenter Flotherm for electronics cooling, it is specifically designed with all its capabilities to tackle electronics cooling tasks. But both tools are not CAD embedded like Simcenter FLOEFD.

So you can see, there is no one-stop-shop solution, the tool that can do everything perfectly. This does not exist and probably will never exist.
Of course there are efforts to put all of the codes under one platform so the right solver is used for the right application, but then it is likely not CAD embedded as well as standalone and easy to use but has a lot of bells and whistles etc.
It's like with cars, you can have a family minivan or a sportscar, but you cannot have both, there is always a trade-off.

It is best to contact your local partner or the vendor and explain what your typical application is and what physics it needs to solve as well as explaining your experience in numerical simulation and your working environment. They would then be best suited to advise you which products would be suitable for you and you can test it on your own if it works for you and take it to a test drive.

As for "marine problems seem to be addressed only in STAR-CCM", this is just what you see they promote the product for. As I said, it depends on the application, as you can see here:
https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/simcent...-work-forward/

Hope this helps,
Boris