Fluent names CFD User of the Year winners

Lebanon, New Hampshire -- Computational fluid dynamics company (CFD) Fluent Inc. has announced the winners of its second annual “CFD User of the Year” event, which covers five specific areas of applied usage.

“The winning papers in each category stood out very clearly to us. All five of them demonstrated pragmatic solution strategies to real-world engineering situations especially with the way they used CFD codes as tools to answer complex problems,” said Dr. Michael Engelman, Fluent vice president.

The title of ‘Most Innovative Use of CFD Technology’ went to Ricardo Baudille from the University of Rome, Italy, for his industrially relevant fluid-structure interaction simulations of deforming Formula 1 racecar wings and fluttering aircraft wings.

Maciej Ginalski from the Silesian University of Technology in Poland won the ‘Most Impact of CFD on Society’ award. This was in recognition of his pioneering PhD work on hospital incubator design improvements to improve survival rates of premature babies.

The ‘Most Impact of CFD on a Business Process’ award went to Marcus Trenker and Wolfgang Payer of the Arsenal Research Center in Austria. Their work focused on modeling snow and ice build-up near train undercarriage vents during winter conditions. They subsequently retrofitted existing train designs for a customer to minimise the amount of time trains are out of service.

The ‘Best Use of CFD as a Design Tool’ award was won by Silvestre Ariaga-Hahn of Opel GmbH, Germany, for his customised external aerodynamics design tool, OVAL. This tool has helped cut the design cycle time for new Opel production saloon cars from 30 to 20 months.

Finally, the ‘Best Industrial CFD Study’ title went to Wayne Strasser of US firm Voridian Inc. for his CFD modeling work which helped to improve understanding of a complex gear mixing pump used in plastics manufacture.