CD-adapco

CD-adapco's legacy CFD package, STAR-CD, was praised by Renault automotive design engineers as a "world class design package". Nearly 75% of the points won during the 2005 Formula One season were awarded to drivers of cars that were designed with STAR-CD.[3]

In 2004, CD-adapco opted to shift their attention from improving STAR-CD to completely rewriting their computational fluid dynamics (CFD) algorithms and tools. The company gambled that in the end, starting from a "blank slate" with a group of experts would produce a better result than continuing to work improvements into their old products[8] In early 2004, the company introduced this new product, STAR-CCM+, the "CCM" standing for "computational continuum mechanics".[9][10] The application employs a client-server architecture, to allow users to solve problems from a lightweight computer, such as a laptop, while the computationally expensive math is done on a remote machine. This substantially reduces the need for expensive desktop computers—a requirement of some other similar packages[11]

Even in periods of major economic downturn, few customers cut back on annual licenses.[1] CD-adapco has speculated that their product's success has been partially because their application was designed from the start to simultaneously solve fluid flow and heat transfer problems. Competing products often consist of separate solvers coupled together, which requires that both be kept in agreement; a time-consuming complication that degrades accuracy.[1]

STAR-CAD is a range of PLM-embedded tools that allows engineers to perform CFD analysis from within their company's chosen CAD environment. STAR-CAD integrates with Catia, Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks and NX.[12]

In a partnership with the United States Department of Energy, CD-adapco developed an expert system to model and analyze solid oxide fuel cells[13]

The first "official release" of STAR-CCM+ included the world's first commercially available polyhedral meshing algorithm.[14] The use of a polyhedral mesh has proven to be more accurate for fluid-flow problems than a hexahedral or tetrahedral mesh of a similar size (number of cells),[15] but is considerably more difficult to create.[15]

Included in STAR-CCM+ is a tool called a "surface wrapper", which "shrink wraps" a user's CAD geometry, filling any holes, overlaps or cracks.[16] The company says that this feature cuts geometry preparation time down from days to minutes.[16]

Siemens and CD-adapco have entered into a stock purchase agreement for the acquisition of CD-adapco by Siemens for a purchase price of $970 million.[17]