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A Historical Perspective |
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Fluent Benelux is probably one of the oldest Fluent office based in Europe as it emerged out of the Polyflow s.a. Company. A quick historical overview will show you that the Fluent CFD experience in Belgium dated back to the mid-80's. Many of these pioneers who then experienced the first successes of numerical simulation are still with us. Creation of Fluent BeneluxThe history of Fluent Benelux is closely related to that of computational rheology. It is a young but rich history that is constantly evolving. The Université Catholique de Louvain (established in 1429) started its research on complex rheology flows as early as the middle of the seventies with the realization that most liquids of industrial interest are (of differing strength) non-Newtonian. Whereas traditional Newtonian fluid mechanics was already well established, non-Newtonian flows presented challenges that attracted the attention of scientists in search of healthy challenges. During the seventies, the research group, led by Professor M. J. Crochet at the Université Catholique de Louvain, dedicated significant resources to the study of rheologically complex flows. This peculiar behavior is more specifically observed for plastic and rubber, though many other materials like oils, liquid detergents, food, paints, inks or blood also experience viscoelasticity. Fueled by the advent of more powerful computers and the realization that the governing equations could be solved with new models (including implicit equations for the stresses in addition to the classical Navier-Stokes equations, rather than perturbation methods force-fit onto classical Newtonian solutions), the research was aimed at developing and implementing new viscoelastic models and implementing them with numerical solution tools. With enthusiastic support in numerous industries highly concerned by this complex matter, the research team was eventually able to develop software that reproduced with amazing accuracy some of these strange phenomena observed in daily life, such as the viscoelastic die swell, the delayed die swell, the Weissenberg (rod-climbing) effect and vortex enhancement, to name just a few. Those tools induced a growing interest among the industrial partners who wanted to benefit from these first successes directly for the good of their own research groups. Indeed, it was now possible to start understanding some of the complex features of material behavior in many important industrial processing situations, in particular polymer and rubber processing. Furthermore, numerical simulation allowed the separate analysis of separately the influence of numerous individual parameters, be it material or processing parameters. Certainly, the computational time was still considerable and the user friendliness of the tools was nothing like what is available today. Nevertheless, this success represented a real breakthrough. To make these numerical features available to the first industrial clients, the interaction with the user needed to be tremendously improved. Also, the many elements of numerical codes were combined into a single software. POLYFLOW was born at the very beginning of the eighties. Quickly, industrial partners started acquiring commercial licenses to analyze and reproduce complex rheological behaviors for the first time ever in their teams. SOLVAY was the very first one to buy a POLYFLOW license in 1982. It has been followed by numerous great names of the plastics and rubber world. Due to the large success encountered by the software during the eighties (more than 20 industrial licenses in 1988 and many more academic licenses), it became difficult to combine the academic spirit of the university with the commercial involvement and different focus of professional dedication required by a fast growing activity. In order to further improve the technical service offered to their clients, a part of the academic team, (Jean-Marie Marchal, Benoit Debbaut and Claire Fery, under the supervision of Professor Crochet) created the Polyflow s.a. company in July 1988. All of them are still with us. To better satisfy the industrial needs, the code had to be more user-friendly and more robust. This was the first task of this newly born company, still located in Louvain-la- Neuve, Belgium, in recognition of its heritage. POLYFLOW version 3 was on its way. After a few months of intense work, a completely rewritten and more integrated version of the code, POLYFLOW 3.0, was delivered to the users in 1990. Growth and Company DevelopmentWanting to concentrate on our core flow modeling technology rather than spending a large amount of resources on more general software technology such as preprocessor and postprocessor, partnerships were established to provide the users with a state of the art postprocessor (CFView by Numeca International in 1992) and mesh generator (Polycem by ICEM Technologies in 1994). In addition to the collaboration with external companies, the Fluent Benelux team itself was growing rapidly. By 1994, 14 engineers were working in the Fluent Benelux office. A big part of the team was dedicated to the implementation of new features, such as blow molding, mixing, glass flow, chemical reactions and new techniques (parallel processing). Most of these developments were carried out through European Projects and partnerships with numerous European Industries such as SOLVAY, DOW BENELUX, HUTCHINSON, VYGON, BASF, GLAVERBEL, KÖMMERLING, and many more. In order to continuously meet the needs of its markets, Polyflow believes strongly in "listening" to the market, coupled with a strong partnership with leading industrial groups of the plastic, rubber and glass industries. Development projects are frequently defined with industrial partners and the company regularly polls both users and prospective users to define further evolutions of POLYFLOW. The first overseas technical support office was opened in May 1994 in New York to support clients in the USA and Canada and to further promote the software in the New World. In the meantime, POLYFLOW, in collaboration with Mitsubishi Corporation, became the unchallenged software on the Japanese market for the Polymer processing industry. With the goal of becoming the worldwide leader in its market and continuing its decade long growth, Polyflow s.a. joined Fluent Inc., which is based in Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA in May 1996. In addition to a fruitful development environment and a part in the leading CFD group in the world, Fluent has provided POLYFLOW with improved worldwide commercial presence through a network of local offices. Today, POLYFLOW is represented in more than 20 offices worldwide. Technical support is provided from Belgium, USA, Japan and South Korea, and Polyflow s.a. is now called Fluent Benelux. Flourishing as a Fluent SubsidiaryBeing part of the fast growing Fluent group, the Belgian office speeds up the pace dramatically. The worldwide representation of the POLYFLOW product via numerous Fluent local offices increased the awareness of the polymer and glass market for our product. This quickly results in a multiplication of the number of licenses as well as in a localization of the news and the local support (currently technical support is provided from North America, Japan, South Korea and India). The Belgian expertise in FEM was also used to develop the European antenna of FIDAP, the other FEM code of Fluent. Some worldwide activities (Product Market Management) and European tasks (Marketing and technical support) are now partially handled by our Belgian office. As a natural extension of its activities, Fluent recognized the importance of the BENELUX market and its interest in the CFD. Therefore the group seized the opportunity of a local office based in the Walloon Brabant to become even closer to its local users and develop specific activities of local interest. The local subsidiary became FLUENT BENELUX in January 2002 and because of its fast growing pace, relocated to brand new larger offices in Wavre in February 2002. View our list of current partners. |
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