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What is computational fluid dynamics, or CFD? And what does that have to do with the America's Cup?

This year it was won by Emirates Team New Zealand. Their secret weapon was NUMECA's FINE/Marine CFD software, which was used to design the hull and foils of the ship. Although if you watched the America's Cup or just watch the video below, you'll see that "hull" is not really the correct word. In fact, even sailing isn't really the right word, it is more like flying. The boat is like nothing you've seen before, riding up on hydrofoils once it has enough speed.

Dan Bernasconi, Head of Design for the team explained that:

With tow tank and tunnel testing banned and no sailing of two AC75s at the same time, it will be the ability of the teams to accurately model and predict the performance of the yachts that will really make the difference. If there's one thing that's going to win the America's Cup for us, that's going to be simulation.

You may know that Cadence recently acquired Belgium-based NUMECA. I wrote about it at the time in my blog post Cadence to Acquire Computational Fluid Dynamics Company NUMECA. So Cadence can bask in reflected glory and pretend we won the America's Cup!

Marc Tombroff

To find out more, I called up Marc Tombroff, who was actually the first employee of the company after it was founded by Dr. Charles Hirsch. That was back in 1993, nearly thirty years ago. His current title is VP R&D and General Manager NUMECA. He told me that the technology was originally developed in the lab at the University of Brussels (known as VUB for Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and it needed further development. It solved the Navier-Stokes equations and did the meshing and post-processing. If you've ever done undergraduate fluid dynamics and hated it (guilty) Navier-Stokes and Reynold's numbers are words to bring back bad memories.

CFD has bigger challenges than some of the other system analysis that Cadence does. Fluid is...well...fluid. So it moves all the time. (As opposed to IC packages, which stay where they are on the PCB.) Progressively they developed the company, industrializing the university technology. There was no GUI, no industrial standard, nor quality management. They did that progressively. Although the solver was multi-purpose, Charles decided rather than offering general CFD, NUMECA would create offerings focused on specific applications, and they started the development of FINE/Turbo. FINE stands for Flow Integrated Environment, the first software environment dedicated to turbomachinery fluid simulation. The choice of turbomachinery was driven by where they had prior experience at the university. Moreover, they already had some initial contact with the company in charge of the design of Vulcain, the engine of the European Ariane rocket. They became a major and longstanding customer and partner of NUMECA.

We were first to be able to simulate a liquid hydrogen pump with its highly 3D turbulent and cavitating flows. They came to us and benchmarked us against some research lab and we won thanks to the quality of our grids and the performance and reliability of our solver. That's how it started.

One key is the meshing capability. We received a CAD file of the turbo pump and generated  high-quality grids. It is very important to get accuracy and quality of the simulated physics. On the other hand, it took a lot of engineering time to place these grid points and we decided to develop an automatic grid generation tool dedicated to turbomachinery. We were the first on market with a product called AUTOGRID, which remains number one in the market. Push a button and in two or three minutes mesh, a turbine, compressor, pumps, anything, is done. The association of AUTOGRID with the performance of our solver, both integrated in a dedicated GUI FINE/Turbo, was a real breakthrough in the market and  we started to get a strong worldwide recognition.

From there we moved to more industrial applications, such as compressors and  turbines, pumps, and turbochargers for cars and trucks. I remember a large deal we eventually won: we ran a benchmark for the world leader turbocharger manufacturer and we were the best in terms of accuracy and time, but we were just around 30 people. Our competition was already much bigger and they won the bid on that basis. I told the manager of the group he could not select a technology that is less accurate and slower and at the same time wish to maintain market leadership in turbochargers. After some discussion, a second benchmark was done confirming NUMECA's performance and NUMECA finally won the deal. It was a very big contract that opened up many new opportunities for us.

NUMECA took a capital investment so that it could afford to invest in sales and create offices worldwide, as well as expanding from turbomachinery to marine...which brings us back to the America's Cup. Marc told me that:

The final of the America’s Cup was Team New Zealand running against Luna Rossa. NZ using FINE/Marine, which is our software to shape the hull and the foils, while Luna Rossa used a competitor's software. If you watch the video and see them going in straight line team, NZ is faster because of the shape of foil and hull. It doesn’t look like a traditional boat anymore but as a revolutionary shape that is not created by engineers thinking on paper but by software. There is more freedom on shapes. Fully 3D. Really beautiful. Far beyond what the human brain can think of. NZ won 7-3, the third time we have won the race with them.

After that, NUMECA expanded to automotive, aerospace, multiphysics. Fluids are everywhere in the world: water, oil, air, combustion, ventilation, pollutants.

We live in fluids.

The strategy was to develop applications to cover all these products but to focus on a software environment that is specific to each market segment.

NUMECA recently introduced new technology OMNIS, which is a totally new platform that is a totally new software environment that can cover all these applications in one client-server platform but with a GUI and workflow that is customizable to each application. OMNIS is meant for multi-disciplinary physics and is a strong candidate for true computer-aided engineering (CAE) covering acoustic, thermal, electric, magnetic, and so on.

The magic is in optimization. We have very strong technology there. Better engines with lower emission and noise, better aerodynamic shapes of aircrafts or cars, for lower consumption, or better hydrodynamic of a boat are some of thousands of examples. The future is clearly in optimization where you give as input the design objectives and constrains of your boat, aircraft or car and the system will deliver the best possible shape.

Joris Vanherzeele

Joris is the worldwide sales and marketing director, and has been at NUMECA for six years.

He gave me some of the history again, of how NUMECA started in turbo-machinery with specific solvers. For 15 years, the strategy was dedicated solvers since that was the easiest way to provide a productivity gain with speed on setup and accurate results.

NUMECA started working with the America’s Cup.

We have been there for three or four Cups and always have come out on top. Last month was the 36th America’s Cup. It always goes into final standoff between defender and challenger. Emirates was the defender against Luna Rossa (Italian team). Heavy battle in the field, heavy battle. This time we came out on top again. One year it was Emirates vs Oracle, and both were using our tools so we knew we were going to "win".

Over the last seven to eight years, NUMECA has put together OMNIS which encompasses all tools from pre-processing, solving, post-processing, and optimization. It can deploy into very complex environments but can keep using a unified environment.

It is great not just for ease of use but also for collaboration.

Learn More

For now, the best place is the NUMECA website that is gradually being transitioned into the Cadence website.

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