Since its first release 20 years ago, STAR-CD has established a reputation for versatility and is unrivaled in its ability to tackle problems involving multiphysics and complex geometries. In the latest release, STAR-CD V4.02 enhances this reputation further with an improved meshing process and the ability to simulate physics till now beyond the reach of mainstream CFD technology.

“Our polyhedral mesh technology is now more powerful than ever before”, says Product Manager Dr Riaz Sanatian. “The combination of high quality automatic polyhedral mesh generation and efficient solver technology will provide you with improved ease-of-use, faster turnaround times and increased solution accuracy, for all classes of flow, in all application areas.”

STAR-CD V4.02 also pushes back the boundaries of CFD by introducing a number of key multi-physics capabilities that are available for the first time in a general purpose CFD code. Much more than just a CFD code, CD-adapco's solver technology allows users to simulate flow, thermal and stress problems in a single solver, using a single computational mesh, without the hassle of solution mapping or data transfer.

“These capabilities will rapidly mature and open the door to routine analysis of a range of applications, such as strongly-coupled fluid/solid interaction problems and mold-filling, that were either very difficult or impossible to solve before”, says Dr Sanatian.