Simcenter STAR-CCM+

Development work on STAR-CCM+ was started after a decision was taken to design a new, integrated CFD tool to replace the existing product STAR-CD which had been developed during the 1980s and 1990s by Computational Dynamics Ltd, a spin-off company from an Imperial College London CFD research group.^[2] STAR-CD was widely used most notably in the automotive industry.^[3] STAR-CCM+ aimed to take advantage of more modern programming methods and to provide an expandable framework.^[4]

STAR-CCM+ was announced at the 2004 AIAA Aerospace Sciences Conference in Reno, Nevada.^[5] A unique feature was a generalized polyhedral cell formulation, allowing the solver to handle any mesh type imported.^[4] The first official release included the first commercially available polyhedral mesher, offering faster model convergence compared to an equivalent tetrahedral mesh.^[6][7]

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is developed according to a continual improvement process, with a new version released every four months.^[8] The program uses a client-server architecture,^[9] implemented using object-oriented programming.^[8]

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is primarily Computational fluid dynamics software which uses the Finite element analysis or Finite volume method to calculate the transport of physical quantities on a discretized mesh. For fluid flow the Navier–Stokes equations are solved in each of the cells. Simcenter STAR-CCM+ has multiphysics capabilities including:

• Fluid flow through porous media
• Multiphase flow
  • Discrete element method
  • Volume of fluid method
• Non-Newtonian fluid
• Rheology
• Turbulence
• Viscoelasticity

Prior to CD-adapco's acquisition by Siemens, the customer base was approximately 3,200 accounts with 52% of licence sales attributed to the automotive industry.

• Computational fluid dynamics
• Computer simulation
• Computer-aided design
• Computer-aided engineering
• List of computational fluid dynamics software