Ten Fluent Users’ Group Meetings were held in Europe, Asia, and Australia this fall. The series of meetings began in Goteborg, Sweden on September 13 and ended in Sydney, Australia on November 12. More than 700 users attended the events, where they listened to application presentations by other users, product reviews and demonstrations by Fluent staff, and a variety of training courses on topics ranging from fluid-structure interaction in FIDAP 8.5 to multiphase modeling in FLUENT. Hardware vendors were in attendance at several meetings, providing loaner machines or demonstrations of new equipment.

Following the Nordic UGM in Sweden, the UK UGM was held in Sheffield, UK on Sept. 16-17. The remaining European meetings were held in Viernheim, Germany on Sept. 20-21, Paris, France on Sept. 23-24, Cervesina, Italy on Sept. 28-29, and Prague in the Czech Republic on Oct. 14-15. A total of 475 users attended these meetings, and offered a total of 100 presentations and posters.

Thirty people attended the POLYFLOW UGM on Oct. 12-13 in Leuven, Belgium. Five major sessions covered applications in the areas of extrusion, blow molding, glass, rheology, and mesh superposition. Open forums and product discussion sessions at all of the meetings offered users the opportunity to provide feedback on their preprocessing, solver, and postprocessing needs.

The Korean UGM was held on Che-Ju Island off the southern coast of Korea on Oct. 14-15, and was followed by the Japanese UGM in Tokyo on Oct. 18-19. These meetings were held mostly in native languages, offering the attendees the best atmosphere for listening to the technical content.

At the Japanese UGM, a simultaneous interpreter was on hand for some of the product reports, and the hope is that simultaneous interpreters will be available for more English-language presentations in upcoming years. The 245 attendees at the meetings offered a total of 28 presentations. A meeting for users in Australia and Southeast Asia was held on Nov. 11-12 in Sydney, Australia.

Feedback from users ranked the user presentations as one of the most useful and popular components of the meetings. High-quality presentations covered topics ranging from electronics cooling to off-shore platforms, from HVAC to aerospace, from visco elastic flows to incinerator modeling. The details of some of these presentations are presented on the following pages.

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