By Keith Hanna, Fluent News

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FLUENT CFD simulation of airflow around the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin Simulation done by Fluent Deutschland using FLUENT. Mesh created by HARPOON, courtesy of Sharc Ltd., UK, and CEI Inc., USA

Since unification in 1989, Germany has become the largest country in Europe with the biggest economy in the European Union, and the third largest in the world after America and Japan. Germany's industrial strength is due in considerable part to the quality of the engineered products it produces. The automotive sector is the largest, with some world-class marques like Audi, BMW, Daimler Chrysler, Porsche, and Volkswagen. In addition, Germany has two of the largest chemical companies in the world, BASF and Bayer, along with several large companies in the power generation, industrial machinery, domestic products, materials processing, pharmaceutical, and construction industries.

Germany exports nearly 500 billion Euros worth of its manufactured products, and with the recent global economic downturn, the demand for German exports has suffered a setback as well. This has resulted in difficult times for the German economy, which has recently experienced a slowing growth and increased unemployment rate. To become more competitive globally, German industry has recognized the need for efficiency improvements in its processes , along with the need to produce higher quality products. This has led to a widespread embracing of new technologies, including computer-aided engineering, across all industry sectors, with the automotive industry leading the way.

Flow and pressure field around the ECO Speedster

German companies spend far more on research and development in Europe than other nations, demonstrating their commitment to technology innovation. Despite this, they were, for many years, relatively cautious about adopting commercial CFD software, compared with the US, Japan, and the UK. No major CFD companies originated in Germany in the 1980s, as they did in the US and England, and it was only in the early 1990s that CFD usage became widely accepted throughout German industry and its leading universities.

A sensor is used to measure mixing behavior in a stirred tank with a dip tube

A strong role in evaluating and adopting CFD technology has been taken by the R&D groups at leading German companies and through early adopters at key universities like Aachen, Darmstadt, Munich Karslruhe, and Stuttgart. By the mid 1990s, the CFD market in Germany started to become very competitive, eventually taking off with the advent of unstructured CFD codes and faster, more powerful, and less expensive hardware. Gradually, CFD software - once the preserve of analysts doing research projects - began to be deployed by engineering and design departments in leading German companies, with the automotive industry again taking the lead. Cost savings, process efficiency gains, and improvements in product quality were major driving factors for the rapid expansion of CFD use in Germany during this time. The high accuracy and robust solvers offered by the most established commercial codes appealed to CFD users in Germany as well.

Flow inside cylinders in a diesel engine

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