CONVERGE CFD Software

Blog

Published December 17, 2018

2018: CONVERGE-ING ON A DECADE

Author:
Kelly Senecal

Owner and Vice President of Convergent Science

Convergent Science thrived in 2018, with many successes, rapid growth, and consistent innovation. We celebrated the tenth anniversary of the commercial release of CONVERGE. The Convergent Science employee count surpassed 100, and our India office tripled in size. We formed new partnerships and collaborations and continued to bring CONVERGE to new application areas. Simultaneously, we endeavored to increase the prominence of CONVERGE in internal combustion applications and grew our market share.

Our dedicated team at Convergent Science ensures that CONVERGE stays on the cutting-edge of CFD software—implementing new models, enhancing CONVERGE features, increasing simulation speed and accuracy—while also offering exceptional support and customer service to our clients.

New Application Successes

Increasingly, clients are using CONVERGE for new applications and great strides are being made in these fields. Technical presentations and papers on gerotor pumps, blood pumps, reciprocating compressors, scroll compressors, and screw machines this year reflected CONVERGE’s increased use in the pumps and compressors markets. Research projects using CONVERGE to model gas turbine combustion, lean blow-out, ignition, and relight are going strong. In the field of aftertreatment, new acceleration techniques have been implemented in CONVERGE to enable users to accurately predict urea deposits in Urea/SCR aftertreatment systems while keeping pace with rapid prototyping schedules. In addition, we were thrilled to see the first paper using CONVERGE for offshore wind turbine modeling published this year, as part of a collaborative effort with the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

CONVERGE Featured at SAE, DOE Merit Review, and ASME ICEF

CONVERGE’s broad use in the automotive industry was showcased at the Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress Experience (SAE WCX18), with more than 30 papers presenting CONVERGE results. Convergent Science cultivates collaboration with industry, academic, and research institutions, and the benefit of these collaborations was prominently displayed at SAE WCX18. Organizations such as General Motors, Caterpillar, Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, Isuzu Motors, John Deere, Renault, Aramco Research Center, Argonne National Laboratory, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Aramco, and the University of Oxford all authored papers describing CONVERGE results. These papers spanned a wide array of topics, including fuel injection, chemical mechanisms, HCCI, GCI, water injection, LES, spray/wall interaction, abnormal combustion, machine learning, soot modeling, and aftertreatment systems.

At the 2018 DOE Merit Review, CONVERGE was featured in 17 of the advanced vehicle technologies projects that were reviewed by the U.S. Department of Energy. The broad range of topics of the projects is a testament to the versatility and broad applicability of CONVERGE. The research for these projects was conducted at Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, the Department of Energy, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the University of Michigan.

CONVERGE was once again well represented at the ASME Internal Combustion Engine Fall Technical Conference (ICEF). At ASME ICEF 2018, 18 papers included CONVERGE results, with topics ranging from ignition systems and injection strategies to emissions modeling and predicting cycle-to-cycle variation. I was honored to have the opportunity to further my cause of defending the IC engine in a keynote presentation.

New Partnerships and Collaborations

At Convergent Science, we take pride in fostering partnerships and collaborations with companies and institutions to spark innovation and bring our best software to the CFD community. This year, we renewed our partnership with Roush Yates Engines, who had a fantastic 2018 season, achieving the company’s 350th win and winning the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Championship. We formed a new partnership with Tecplot and integrated their industry-leading visualization software into CONVERGE Studio. In addition, we entered into new partnerships with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and two Dassault Systèmes subsidiaries, Spatial Corp. and Abaqus. These partnerships improve the usability and applicability of CONVERGE and help CONVERGE reach new markets.

CONVERGE in Italy

We had a great showing of CONVERGE users at our second European CONVERGE User Conference held this year in Bologna, Italy. Attendees shared their latest research using CONVERGE for a host of different applications, from modeling liquid film boiling and mitigating engine knock to developing turbulent combustion models and simulating premixed burners with LES. For one of our networking events, we rented out the Ferrari Museum in Maranello, where we were treated to a tour of the museum and ate dinner surrounded by cars we wished we owned. We also enjoyed traditional Bolognese cuisine at the Osteria de’ Poeti and a reception at the Garganelli Restaurant. 

Turning 10 at the U.S. CONVERGE User Conference

It seemed only fitting to celebrate ten years of CONVERGE back where it all started in Madison, Wisconsin. During the fifth annual North American User Conference, we commemorated CONVERGE’s tenth birthday with a festive evening at the historic Orpheum Theater in downtown Madison. During the celebration, we heard from Jamie McNaughton of Roush Yates Engines, who discussed the game-changing impact of CFD on creating winning racing engines. Physics Girl Dianna Cowern entertained us with her live physics demonstrations and her unquenchable enthusiasm for all things science. I concluded the evening with a brief presentation (which you can check out below) reflecting on the past decade of CONVERGE and looking forward to the future. We were incredibly grateful to be able to celebrate the successes of CONVERGE with our users who have made these past ten years possible.

In addition to our 10-year CONVERGE celebration, we hosted our third trivia match at the Convergent Science World Headquarters. At the beautiful Madison Club, we heard a fascinating round of presentations on topics including gas turbine modeling, offshore fluid-structural dynamics, machine learning, and a wide range of IC engine applications.

Convergent Science India

The Convergent Science India office in Pune celebrated its one-year anniversary in August. The office has transformed in the span of the last year and a half. The employee count more than tripled—from two employees at the end of 2017 to seven at the end of 2018. Five servers are now up and running and the office is fully staffed. We’re thrilled with the service and support our Pune office has been able to offer our clients all around India.

CONVERGE 3.0 Coming Soon

CONVERGE 3.0 is slated to be released soon, and we truly believe this new version of CONVERGE will once again change the CFD game. In 3.0, you can look forward to our new boundary layer mesh and inlaid mesh features, which will allow greater meshing flexibility for accurate results at less computational cost. Our new partnership with Spatial Corp. will enable CONVERGE users to directly import CAD files into CONVERGE Studio, greatly streamlining our Studio users’ workflow. We’ve also focused a lot of our attention this year towards enhancing our chemistry tools to be more efficient, robust, and applicable to an even greater range of flow and combustion problems. We’ve added new 0D and 1D reactors, including a perfectly stirred reactor, 0D HCCI engine, RON and MON estimators, plug flow reactors, and improved our 1D laminar flame solver. Additionally, we enhanced our mechanism reduction capability by targeting both ignition delay and laminar flamespeed. But perhaps the most anticipated aspect of CONVERGE 3.0 is the scaling. 3.0 demonstrates dramatically superior parallelization compared to 2.4 and shows significant speedup even on thousands of cores.

Looking Ahead

2019 promises to be an exciting year. With the upcoming release of CONVERGE 3.0, we’re looking forward to growing CONVERGE’s presence in new application areas, continuing our work on pumps and compressors, and expanding our presence in aftertreatment and gas turbine markets. We will continue working hard to expand the usage of CONVERGE in the European, Asian, and Indian automotive markets. Above all, we look forward to more innovation, more collaboration, and continuing to provide unparalleled support to our clients. Want to join us? Check out our website to find out how CONVERGE can help you solve the hard problems.

Kelly looks back on the past decade of CONVERGE during the 10-Year Celebration at the 2018 CONVERGE User Conference-North America. The video Kelly references in his presentation is a video tribute to CONVERGE that was played earlier in the evening, Turning 10: A CONVERGE History.

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