Mid-market engineering teams face a familiar tension: products keep getting more complex, but headcount and simulation hours stay flat. This blog explores how Simcenter STAR-CCM+ solves this challenge. The companies below are not massive corporations with in-house simulation departments. They are specialized firms using STAR-CCM+ to compete with much larger players. Here is how three of them, across a variety of industries, are putting real-world CFD to work.
Aerospace: TLG Aerospace
TLG Aerospace is a Seattle-based engineering firm that helps aircraft manufacturers get new and modified planes certified. Getting an aircraft certified usually means thousands of flight hours, mountains of documentation, and millions of dollars. That is a heavy lift even for a global organization like Boeing, so imagine taking it on as a mid-market firm.
STAR-CCM+ is how TLG Aerospace meets that challenge. Running the software on elastic cloud computing, the team builds the large aerodynamic databases the FAA requires for certification at a fraction of the usual cost, cutting the price of each simulation by 75%. That savings lets TLG Aerospace take on bigger, more competitive projects than a firm its size could otherwise afford to bid on. STAR-CCM+ has now played a role in every certification program TLG Aerospace has worked on.
Defense: Martin UAV
Martin UAV, based in Plano, Texas, builds tactical drones for the United States across the Army, Marine Corps, and Navy. When the company set out to build the V-BAT, the first true vertical takeoff and landing drone with a ducted fan design, the team needed to test the airflow around that duct in both hover and forward flight without building and breaking hundreds of physical prototypes.
Martin UAV chose STAR-CCM+ after running a head-to-head evaluation against other CFD software. With this search, the company discovered other products, such as Simcenter HEEDS, which it now uses as a design exploration tool to work through thousands of design variations. The result of these tools was a drone that flew for more than eight hours, carried an eight-pound payload, and covered a 350-mile range.
Manufacturing: ABEC
ABEC has been building process equipment for the biopharmaceutical industry since 1974, and one of its toughest challenges is predicting how a bioreactor design will behave as it scales from a small lab bench to a full production unit, since biological processes do not scale in a straight line.
Using STAR-CCM+, ABEC validated its CFD models against small-scale lab tests, then used those validated models to guide full-scale designs with confidence. On one project, the team used this approach to cut blend time, a critical measure of how evenly a bioreactor mixes its contents, by 50%.
What these companies have in common
None of these companies had the budget or headcount of a global manufacturer, and none of them needed it. Each one used STAR-CCM+ to compress a testing and prototyping process that would otherwise have taken far more time, money, and physical hardware. That is the real promise of CFD for a mid-market engineering team, not just simulating a product accurately, but doing it fast enough and affordably enough to actually change how the business competes.
Interested in learning how Simcenter STAR-CCM+ can be implemented in your organization? Contact us today.