CCM+ vs CFX vs Fluent
 

Hi I am a current user of CCM+, I am wondering what CFX and Fluent offers in terms of solver speed, meshing algorythm and user friendlyness. I use CFD in the building industry, so I am not too worried about the turbulence models used for mach > 10...

Re: CCM+ vs CFX vs Fluent
 

My experience is on Ansys CFX v.10 in Workbench and Fluent 6.2, and I've been recently exposed to CCM+ as a CFD consultant.

My opinion is that CCM+ is the most user friendly, followed by CFX, which still retains separated mesh-pre-post-solver interfaces, and Fluent, which has the most outdated interface. Of course simulation setup speed will vary enormously depending on the user skills.

About meshing, I feel the default CCM+ mesher is better than CFX Workbench mesher and somewhat less powerful than Gambit (which is the Fluent mesher). On the other side Ansys can offer what I think is the state of the art mesher: ICEM, if you can afford it. It is also to be pointed out that CCM+ has a unique polyhedra mesher, which brings me on the speed topic.

On a tetrahedral cell number basis I found more speed difference between different machines than between different codes, by the way I didn't have many chanches to run benchmarks on a single machine. But if you consider that for a given problem if you use polyhedral istead of tetrahedral cells the same accuracy can generally be acheived using less than half cells, on an accuracy basis I can say CCM+ is the faster.

Hope this helps, Vmax

Re: CCM+ vs CFX vs Fluent
 

One thing worth adding is that CFX always solves on Polyhedral control volumes, doing so by way of it's discretization rather than requiring a Polyhedral mesh up front. CFX also solves the fully coupled mass and momentum equations, making it the most robust and scalable of the three solvers.

-RK