Simcenter STAR-CCM+


Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics based simulation software developed by Siemens Digital Industries Software. Simcenter STAR-CCM+ allows the modeling and analysis of a range of engineering problems involving fluid flow, heat transfer, stress, particulate flow, electromagnetics and related phenomena.
Formerly known as STAR-CCM+, the software was first developed by CD-adapco and was acquired by Siemens Digital Industries Software as part of the purchase of CD-adapco in 2016. It is now a part of the Simcenter Portfolio of software tools.

History

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 Professor Brian Spalding's Imperial College London research group. During this time, STAR-CD had obtained a market leading position across a number of applications, most notably in the automotive industry. In 2005, nearly 75% of all points scored during the Formula One World Championship were won in cars designed using STAR-CD. By developing a new tool from scratch, STAR-CCM+ aimed to take advantage of more modern programming methods and to provide an expandable framework in which to further develop the code's capabilities and application scope.
STAR-CCM+ was first announced at the 2004 AIAA Aerospace Sciences Conference in Reno, Nevada. One of the unique features was a generalized polyhedral cell formulation, allowing the solver to handle any mesh type imported. The first official release included the world's first commercially available polyhedral mesher, a technology able to deliver model convergence up to ten times faster than an equivalent tetrahedral mesh.

Development

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is developed according to a continual improvement process, with a new version released every four months. The program consists of a client-server architecture, implemented using object-oriented programming. The server executable is written in C++ and the client implemented in Java. This approach allows for the pre- and post-processing activities and the more demanding computation to be carried out on different hardware, if desired.
At the start of the 2019 calendar year, the numbering convention for Simcenter STAR-CCM+ versions was changed to match that used by other Siemens software products. The original numbering convention continues to denote the build number.

Usage

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, making Simcenter STAR-CCM+ the leading multiphysics solution in that market.