PacMar Technologies excels in creating advanced products and solutions tailored for the defense and maritime sectors. It supports customers in transforming concepts into sea-ready physical prototypes, employing modeling, simulation, and construction expertise to develop innovative systems for the Department of Defense and other partners.
PacMar Technologies’ use of CFD
PacMar Technologies leads the way for the marine industry because of its early adoption of CFD technology approximately 25 years ago. It uses simulation software such as Simcenter Star-CCM+ in product development to reduce costs and enable innovative design solutions that were previously unattainable with traditional methods. PacMar Technologies’ use of CFD also allows it to innovate faster by reducing the need for as many physical prototypes.
“STAR-CCM+ gives us the ability to do very high fidelity CFD simulations in a cost-effective manner,” Chief Technology Officer of PacMar Technologies, Priya Hicks said. “We’ve been able to take those simulations and compare them to real world tests that we’ve done, or model tests that we’ve done to verify the accuracy to give our engineers the confidence that this is the right simulation capability for the problems that we’re trying to solve.”
Bringing the virtual into the physical
PacMar Technologies faces a set of unique challenges due to being in the marine industry.
“The challenge of maritime design is the actual sea itself. If you go into the aviation realm, it tends to be a much more stable fluid flow,” Chief Executive Officer at PacMar Technologies, Dan Brunk said. “We are dealing with the waves, the surf zone, currents, wind, and everything coming together in an incompressible fluid that we’re trying to operate either on the surface or under the sea, underneath the surface with our unmanned undersea vehicles.”
PacMar Technologies is able to efficiently operate under these unique conditions because of its ability to simulate models digitally before building them. The ability to effectively simulate and utilize software tools like Star-CCM+ is paramount to PacMar Technologies’ success.
“We do everything virtually or digitally at PacMar Technologies,” Director, Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at PacMar Technologies, Scott Yamashita said. “We use tools that we get from Applied CAx. Then, as fast as we can imagine it and model it, we run a simulation and get a result that would normally take weeks or months if we had to do it through more traditional methods.”
Thanks to tools like Simcenter STAR-CCM+, PacMar Technologies has been able to develop innovations in the marine industry, receiving a variety of patents for its novel designs and becoming renowned for innovation.
The advanced users at PacMar Technologies need advanced support. Applied CAx is able to draw from its experience in other sectors to help PacMar Technologies overcome hurdles faster.
Pushing the limits of CFD
Even with its experience in CFD, PacMar Technologies faces challenges with this technology because it is constantly pushing the CFD code to its limits. PacMar Technologies turned to Applied CAx to navigate these challenges and find solutions that keep it innovating faster.
“Development in the marine domain is a pretty niche portion of engineering. We often push the Star CCM+ solver in unique ways.” Director, Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at PacMar Technologies, Scott Yamashita said. “Applied CAx has been instrumental in helping us either develop the solution to our problems or pointing us to an exact solution from their wealth of knowledge across all uses of the code. It is interesting to sometimes hear the solution comes from a problem encountered in a use case very different from ours.”
Like a lot of software out there, Star-CCM+ goes through regular updates to better support users. PacMar Technologies is an early adopter and has been known to make use of these updates immediately, often times before there is a lot of documentation available. This is where its partnership with Applied CAx comes into play. PacMar Technologies can rely on Applied CAx to help it maximize these updates to further increase its efficiency with product cycles.
Applied CAx is proud to assist PacMar Technologies with software, training, and support as an allied partner.
Learn more about PacMar Technologies’ partnership with Applied CAx in this video.
By Kirstin Saha
Marketing at Applied CAx