The company, which currently lies second in this year's F1 Constructors' Championship, has added "several hundred" HP ProLiant Intel-based servers to its Oxfordshire headquarters.

"Last year showed us that our chassis was a model of reliability but that there's still room for improvement, particularly on the aerodynamic front," said Patrick Head, technical director at Williams.

A spokesman for Williams F1 added that the main driver behind the decision to expand the team's supercomputing resource was the need to reduce the time taken to perform a complete analysis for a given size of model.

The VEAG power plant in Boxberg, Germany, has recently recorded a world-record of 48.5% gross efficiency for its Siemens’ steam turbine, with specific efficiencies of 94.2% for the high-pressure turbine and 96.1% for the intermediate-pressure turbine.

By allowing Siemens engineers to visualize the flow inside the turbine with a minimum amount of model tests, CFX played an important role in the development of that turbine. We selected CFX-TASCflow primarily because it can analyze a much broader range of turbine features than the other packages that we investigated, and over the years it has proven its ability to model most of our designs. We have also found that CFX staff provide very competent technical support.

The CD adapco Group's answer has been to develop a "plug-in" for their CFD code STAR-CD, called STAR-Design, that provides an alternative path through the full STAR-CD system. It enables simple incompressible/compressible, laminar/turbulent flow and heat transfer cases to be set up and run with unprecedented ease, speed and accuracy.

When a fighter pilot engages an enemy at near sonic speeds, abrupt wing stall is definitely not part of his flight plan. Yet for the past 50 years, all aircraft that can operate at velocities near the speed of sound, and angles of attack near maximum lift, have experienced some form of uncommanded lateral motion – where the aircraft undergoes a one-sided or side-to-side upset from the intended direction of flight. At the very least, it causes loss of advantage. At its worst, it could result in a loss of the aircraft.

"This is not the first time this aerodynamic behavior has been seen" notes Lawrence Ash, the Office of Naval Research program manager leading the national study. "It can sometimes be fixed by modifications to the aircraft flight control system.

Accurate simulation and analysis is often needed to ensure the robustness of an early stage design. Historically, for those design challenges that involved fluid flow, heat transfer and other multiphysics, CFD analysis has been too difficult and too slow to be used within the design environment, and has therefore been used as a technology tool by analysts, usually in the R&D environment. What the design engineers have needed is a robust tool that has minimal learning curve, rapid turnaround and reliable solutions.

The lack of integrity in CAD data is one impediment to the effective use of CFD for solving engineering problems of interest to the Navy. One example of a simulation impeded by poor CAD data involves aircraft operating in and around a ship's airwake. These CFD simulations are hindered by the fact that CAD data for the ship and/or aircraft when delivered to the engineer is not suitable for CFD meshing due to two main problems. The first problem involves geometric surfaces that don't properly fit together and instead contain gaps and overlaps (more specifically, they "leak"). The second problem involves excessive detail, both in the number of entities used to define the geometry (for example, using thousands of surfaces to define the hull) and in the level of geometric detail included in the CAD file.