Hi! I wonder who are the founders of each commercial code and what are their affiliations?

1) Star-CD 2) Phoenics 3) Numeca 4) CFX 5) CFD-RC 6) Fluent 7) More?

Interesting thread, here comes my $0.02

Star-CD - not really sure, I think it grew out of Imperial college and Prof. Gosmans group there

Phoenics - Prof. Brian Spalding (a legend in CFD), formerly professor of Heat Transfer at Imperial College, now director of CHAM.

Numeca - Prof. Charles Hirsch, Vrije University, Brussles, I think that their codes originates from the Euranus code developed together with FOI a long time ago.

CFX - don't know, CFX has two origins, the SIMPLE side originating from CFX4 and AEA's work in the UK mainly within the nuclear sector and the Tascflow side with its coupled solver, originating from ASC, bought by CFX many years ago, mainly focused on turbomachinery application.

CFDRC - don't know, probably originated from NASA or some US defence/aerospace industry

Fluent - I've heard different stories about fluent. Some say it originated from Spalding's work others say the original code was was written Fluent's current director, Ferit Boysan. Both are probably true. I'm sure someone else can provide more details.

I am sure that Ferit Boysan is the founder of Fluent.

No Bharatan Patel is Founder of Fluent, CFDRC is founded by an Indian name I am not sure.

Flow-3D (Flow Science Corp, now located in Santa Fe, NM) was founded by C. W. "Tony" Hirt, originally based partly on his work with VOF at Los Alamos.

Let's check the link below:

http://www.fluent.com/about/news/new.../98v7i2/a1.htm

1983, overseeing both the technical and commercial success of the company. Early on, he was a major contributor to development of the original FLUENT software, authoring its core combustion and turbulence models. Under his leadership, Fluent Europe was established in 1990 and has prospered and expanded into Fluent Germany, Fluent France, and Fluent Italy, making Fluent the market leader in Europe. In recognition of his accomplishments and operations management skills, Dr. Boysan was promoted to COO last year.

As outgoing president, Dr. Patel retains an active connection with Fluent as its CEO and member of Fluent's Executive team, while fulfilling his role as President and COO of our parent company, Aavid Thermal Technologies, Inc.

STARCD is from David Gosman and Rad Issa from Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College. They had an early involvement with the consulting company ADAPCO.

PHOENICS is from Brian Spalding formerly of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College and, briefly, Chemical Engineering before returning fulltime to CHAM.

NUMECA -

CFX (originally called something else - anyone?) was a general purpose CFD code from Harwell. They had several CFD research codes at the time but opted to created a new one to exploit commercially. Later they took over TASCFLOW and were recently taken over themselves by ANSYS.

CFDRC -

FLUENT came out of Jim Swithenbanks combustion group at Sheffield. Unlike the other UK groups they were not an established CFD research group. They had an early involvement with the consulting company CREARE.

The commercial exploitation of CFD codes within UK academia is a very interesting topic of conversation over a beer if you get the chance to discuss it with people around at the time.

Patel founded the company Fluent (by buying the rights to the code FLUENT from Creare).

The FLUENT code was originally written by Boysan and William Ayers and ...? at Sheffield.

There is little or nothing of the original code in the current Fluent 6.x code - it is derived more from the Rampant product than the old Fluent 3 or 4.

CFDRC --

Founded by Ashok K. Singhal. He wrote (most of) the code when he was working at NASA - Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He then bought the IP from NASA, formed a separate company in Huntsville. NASA was his biggest client for 10 years or so, and then he made a move towards semiconductors, etc

The CFX4 ancestor to CFX (the one from AEA Harwell, UK, not the Tascflow origin from ASC in Canada) used to be called Flow3D. They changed the name to CFX about 10 or 15 years ago I think, when FlowScience politely reminded AEA that the name Flow3D was already taken ... (I don't know any more details of that name-conflict incident, anyone?)

Interesting! Anyone know who were the original developers of Rampant? Was it developed inhouse at Fluent or did it come from academia?

In the mid-1980's, Creare generously lent the academic institution I was at the source code for Fluent 3.1. Many of the subroutines were shown as programmed by W.H. Ayers, but I don't remember seeing any other names in the code.

Tony Hirt told me how this was resolved years ago. All I remember is that Tony and someone from CFX sat down with their respective attorneys and worked it out. The surviving flow-3d (Flow Science in Santa Fe) has the hyphen.

Thank you! I think this certainly helps in a way (for MBA students or business people?). Surely each of the codes have evolved and revolved so much ever since and the current developers within respective companies are more significant and more important. (Which is why these founders are sometimes forgotten).

FLOW3D to CFX4, AZTEC to CFX5.5-6, then combined to CFX5.7. As mentioned before FLOW3D was commercialzed by AEA Harwell, but the original FLOW3D code was written by one person(I do not remember his name) at early 1980s and the AZTEC was developed by a group at AEA working for fast breeder nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics at northern part of Scotland at 1990s. The core developers were Drs. Webster and Lonsdale at AEA.

Correct, Flow3D-CFDS became CFX-4.x, after the FlowScience name conflict.

AZTEC is not part of the current CFX-5.3-->CFX-5.7.x product. CFX-5.x was a complete rewrite from the TFC 3.1 product from ASC. It is based on TASCflow numerics not only for hexes, but hybrid meshes as well. It includes all the major models that once existed in CFX-4.x, and TASCflow 2.x..

Nice thread,

> Interesting! Anyone know who were the original
: developers of Rampant? Was it developed inhouse at
: Fluent or did it come from academia?

Mostly at Creare/Fluent by Wayne Smith, Jonathan Weiss, and others. I assume at least some of the work was extending their phd research. If you search you can find some aiaa papers.

> STARCD is from David Gosman and Rad Issa from
: Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College.
: They had an early involvement with the consulting company ADAPCO.

Prof Gosman is still very involved with CD-adapco, as the last user conference agenda shows:

http://www.cd-adapco.com/support/USU...agenda_CA.html

Yes David Gosman is still a director of CD-adapco, he founded computational dynamics in the mid 80s (because the fluent guys nicked his idea so i have heard). Adapco started in 1980 and bought CD in the mid 90s

adapco didn't buy CD. adapco bought a minority share of CD early in its life. The ownership now is a result of the comings and goings of different people over the years.