Analysis and Design Application Company (stylized "adapco") was founded in New York in 1980 as an engineering consultancy company focusing on finite element method analysis.[5] In 1987, Adapco invested in and began to collaborate with Computational Dynamics, a startup company formed by members of a CFD research group at Imperial College London. Eventually the two companies began to jointly trade under the name CD-adapco.[6]
In their 2009 annual user conference, CD-adapco announced that the company had grown 22% in 2008, and they expected similar results in 2009.[1] Professional Engineering Magazine described this as "recession-proof performance" and went on to point out that this success is especially noteworthy considering that many of the company's customers are in the automotive industry, a sector of the economy that was, at the time, suffering record low sales levels.[1] During the financial downturn of 2009, CD-adapco launched their "No Engineer Left Behind" program, which provided free STAR-CCM+ licenses and training for displaced and unemployed engineers.[7]
In April 2016, Siemens acquired CD-adapco for US$970 million.
Products
A screenshot of a fluid-flow analysis being conducted in STAR-CCM+
STAR-CD
CD-adapco's legacy CFD package, STAR-CD, was praised by Renault automotive design engineers as a "world class design package". Nearly 75% of the points won during the 2005 Formula One season were awarded to drivers of cars that were designed with STAR-CD.[3]
In 2004, CD-adapco opted to shift their attention from improving STAR-CD to completely rewriting their computational fluid dynamics (CFD) algorithms and tools. The company gambled that in the end, starting from a "blank slate" with a group of experts would produce a better result than continuing to work improvements into their old products[8] In early 2004, the company introduced this new product, STAR-CCM+, the "CCM" standing for "computational continuum mechanics".[9][10] The application employs a client-server architecture, to allow users to solve problems from a lightweight computer, such as a laptop, while the computationally expensive math is done on a remote machine. This substantially reduces the need for expensive desktop computers—a requirement of some other similar packages[11]
Even in periods of major economic downturn, few customers cut back on annual licenses.[1] CD-adapco has speculated that their product's success has been partially because their application was designed from the start to simultaneously solve fluid flow and heat transfer problems. Competing products often consist of separate solvers coupled together, which requires that both be kept in agreement; a time-consuming complication that degrades accuracy.[1]
A simple valve discretized into finite volume cells using CD-adapco's polyhedral mesher
Meshing of computational domain
The first release of STAR-CCM+ included the world's first commercially available polyhedral meshing algorithm.[14] The use of a polyhedral mesh has proven to be more accurate for fluid-flow problems than a hexahedral or tetrahedral mesh of a similar size (number of cells),[15] but is considerably more difficult to create.[15]
Automatic surface repair
Included in STAR-CCM+ is a tool called a "surface wrapper", which "shrink wraps" a user's computer-aided design geometry, filling any holes, overlaps or cracks.[16] The company says that this feature cuts geometry preparation time down from days to minutes.[16]
Siemens acquisition
Siemens and CD-adapco have entered[when?] into a stock purchase agreement for the acquisition of CD-adapco by Siemens for a purchase price of $970 million.[17]
