Simulation Software

Many software are present on the market which allow to perform CFD simulations. Each of them has peculiar features and allows several different kinds of studies. The main differences concern the following aspects:

• multi-purpose VS specific for certain limited domain area;
  

• commercial (certified; high license costs, especially for multi-CPU runs; technical support included; not modifiable; source code not available) VS open- source (completely free; infinitely parallelizable; deep technical knowledge needed by the user; source code completely open and modifiable depending on the user needs; not certified);

• body-fitted mesh (the standard solution) VS immersed-boundary approach (simple cartesian mesh overlapped to the body geometry, which requires solution of accordingly-modified governing equations) VS CFD meshless techniques (see here).

Concerning the option about commercial and open-source codes, DOFWARE is involved in different ways in the usage of both of them. Anyway, the open-source framework is a key aspect for DOFWARE due to the following reasons:

• in the academic and in the scientific production, a myriad of numerical and physical approaches are documented and tested, each one with its pros and cons, and innovative techniques are continuously introduced and developed. The open-source philosophy allows to exploit this huge amount of information, first of all for getting a deep insight of what is already implemented. Based on this knowledge, DOFWARE is able to provide reliable results at the cutting-edge of technology;

• when the Customer needs specific help about niche application fields, DOFWARE exploits its technical background and the open-source framework for implementing ad-hoc models and algorithms, which are not present in commercial software yet. The advantage for the Customer is a quick solution to the problem, which provides a reduced time-to-market;

• in an open-source framework, the communication among different tools is relatively simple to set-up, as codes are modifiable almost at any point depending on the actual requirements. The user does not have to adapt himself to the tools features (the standard approach of commercial codes): on the contrary, tools are modified in order to meet the user needs. In this sense, DOFWARE provides ad-hoc customizations of open-source software, in order to reduce as much as possible the impact that the adoption of new tools has on the internal best practices;

• the absence of certification for the largest amount of the open-source tools is not always a disadvantage; their cost-free peculiarity enlarges the number of users, increasing indirectly the number of tests and encouraging the developer community to improve and to correct continuously any arised bug or problem.

On the other side, DOFWARE supports even Customers that ask for CFD consultancy services with specific commercial software. In this framework, DOFWARE couples its CFD technical expertise to a wide knowledge of the most used commercial software concerning:

• CFD solver codes;

• pre-processing tools for building 3D CAD models and 3D meshes (tetra, hexa, poly, etc.);

• post-processing tools for visualizing and understanding CFD results, in order to address the design activity as fast as possible.