Siemens has acquired Nextflow Software, a provider of advanced particle-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solutions.
Nextflow Software will become part of the Simcenter software portfolio, adding rapid meshless CFD capabilities to accelerate the analysis of complex transient applications in the automotive, aerospace, and marine industries – such as gear box lubrication, tank sloshing or electric motor spray cooling.
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Nantes, France, Nextflow Software has focused on the development of innovative Smooth-Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) meshless CFD methods, in which Siemens says it has played a ‘critical role’ in moving SPH from academic labs into the hands of analysts across industries, to be used earlier in the product development cycle.
“Our customers need to leverage sophisticated simulations earlier and more often in their design process, and this is creating a strong demand for rapid and automated CFD of dynamic gas-liquid flows,” said Jean-Claude Ercolanelli, senior VP, simulation and test solutions, Siemens Digital Industries Software.
“Meshless technology has emerged as a leading solution to greatly reduce the setup and solving times for this class of problems, accelerating time to results and prove the behaviour of products at a reduced time and cost.”
Siemens says that the addition of Nextflow Software’s SPH technology into the Simcenter portfolio can enable analysts to leverage the complementary nature of meshless and mesh-based solvers to capitalise on each of their strengths, opening the door to new applications that were previously difficult to address.
“We are very excited to join Siemens and expand the scope of CFD simulation for our customers,” said Nextflow Software CEO Vincent Perrier.
“Today, there is no single validation approach that fits all industrial applications. As engineering problems become more complex and design cycles are shortened, analysts must find the optimal trade-off between accuracy and computation time. Nextflow Software’s SPH solutions nicely complement the existing CFD offering in the Simcenter Portfolio to overcome challenges of complexity and long run-times.”
