Benefits
Events
Products & Programs
Author:
Kelly Senecal
Owner and Vice President of Convergent Science
As the original developers of CONVERGE, Eric, Keith, and I agree that there’s nothing more rewarding than seeing our employees accomplish things the three of us never could have achieved on our own. We may have laid the foundation of CONVERGE, but our employees are responsible for building the code into the powerhouse CFD solver that it is today. We never imagined when we started out that we would be solving such complex problems across such a wide range of application areas. If you had told me that our software would be used by major manufacturers, small startups, research labs, and students around the world to simulate everything from heart valves to rocket engines, I would have thought you were crazy. But thanks to the hard work and ingenuity of our incredible team, that’s exactly where we are today.
This past year exemplified the exciting technological advances that happen when you bring together a bunch of talented individuals to take on challenging problems. In 2024, we released a new major version of our CONVERGE CFD software and significantly upgraded our cloud computing platform, CONVERGE Horizon. We held successful conferences and workshops both online and in-person, where we got to showcase the impressive advancements CONVERGE users are making in their fields. We continued our collaborations and expanded our programs, and, as always, we endeavored to provide our users with the best possible software and support.
At Convergent Science, we take pride in working closely with our customers. Establishing relationships with our users allows us to better understand their simulation needs and the challenges they’re facing, so we can work on developing appropriate solutions. A common sentiment among our clients is that speed is of the essence—faster turnaround time on simulation results allows them to make quicker design decisions to accelerate product development.
We took that to heart with the release of CONVERGE 4 back at the tail end of March. Version 4 features a brand new steady-state solver, the Under-Relaxation Steady (URS) solver, which has demonstrated a speedup of up to 100 times for certain simulations compared to the previous solver. CONVERGE 4 also includes a new 2D axisymmetric solver and a cross-stream synchronization approach that can speed up axisymmetric problems and simulations with large differences in time-scales, respectively.
In addition to these acceleration techniques, we incorporated enhanced combustion capabilities for more accurate simulations of alternative fuels such as ammonia and hydrogen. We also added a host of new models for multi-phase flows, discrete phase parcels, coupled electric potential fields, leakage flows, and much more. On the post-processing side, we integrated a customized version of ParaView into CONVERGE Studio to enable a more seamless workflow, from case setup to visualization, all in one program. Of course, development never ends, and we’re hard at work on CONVERGE 5, coming in 2025!
It’s an exciting time to be in CFD, as significant advances in computing technology are enabling ever larger, faster, and more accurate simulations. Historically, however, the impact of these advancements has been limited due to the expense of installing and maintaining large on-prem clusters. The advent of cloud commuting provided a pathway for many more people to realize the benefits of advanced computing architectures.
At Convergent Science, we wanted to make it easier and more affordable for our users to get access to the latest, state-of-the-art hardware, so we launched CONVERGE Horizon in 2022. This year, we released an upgraded version of the cloud computing platform. The new platform offers a significantly improved user interface, additional hardware and licensing options, and a variety of new features. With improved tools for submitting and monitoring jobs, a more streamlined organization setup process, and expanded collaborative capabilities, the new CONVERGE Horizon platform offers increased flexibility and functionality. Furthermore, we added the ability to pre- and post-process simulations directly in the cloud with the new workstations feature. With the addition of workstations, you can now execute your entire simulation workflow, from case setup to data analysis and visualization, directly in the cloud.
This year, we hosted two in-person CONVERGE workshops in Europe. These workshops serve as an opportunity for the local engineering community to get together and share their latest research updates in a particular field.
In May, we held the 2024 CONVERGE Application Workshop: Hydrogen at the University of Orléans. The event focused on the potential of green hydrogen as a fuel for sustainable transportation systems, with a series of technical presentations offering insight into the development of innovative hydrogen technologies. Speakers at the event represented a variety of leading companies, including Daimler Truck, Volvo Group Trucks Technology, and Schaeffler Technologies. Attendees had the opportunity to tour the PRISME laboratory at the University of Orléans and to participate in a fun networking dinner at the Garden ICE Café (what a great name for a restaurant!).
One month later, we held the CONVERGE Applications Workshop: Solutions for Low-Carbon Transportation in partnership with the SAE International Torino Section. This event took place at the Politecnico di Torino and showcased innovative, state-of-the-art solutions to reduce carbon emissions from transportation systems. Speakers from GammaTech Engineering, Dumarey Automotive Italia, CMT – Clean Mobility & Thermofluids, and the Politecnico di Torino – Energy Center discussed their latest advancements in hydrogen technology and low-carbon combustion systems. Participants got to visit Dumarey Automotive Italia and Politecnico di Torino to see their cutting-edge research facilities, and we all enjoyed some outstanding Italian cuisine at Società Canottieri Armida.
As has become tradition in recent years, we held a global, online CONVERGE CFD Conference at the end of October. While our in-person workshops provide a more intimate gathering with local researchers, our online conference offers a forum for engineers all around the world to virtually gather and share ideas. The conference proved to be a huge success and the largest event we’ve held to date, with over 850 registrants from 55 different countries.
The conference consisted of a three-day live event, followed by a month-long on-demand segment, where attendees could watch the presentations at their leisure. We had an impressive lineup of speakers from a variety of prominent organizations, including Ferrari, Volvo Group Trucks Technology, Toyota Motor North America, UL Research Institutes, Intelligent Energy, and Clair Engineers. We also had three insightful keynote presentations: Professor Federico Millo from Politecnico di Torino spoke about hydrogen engines; Marc Sens, Senior Vice President of Technology and Research at IAV, discussed methods for combatting thermal propagation in battery packs; and our own Keith Richards highlighted some of the new and upcoming features in CONVERGE.
Collaborating with prestigious research organizations, such as the U.S. national laboratories and IFP Energies nouvelles, is crucial to our success in staying on the leading edge of CFD technology. These collaborations help us develop and implement advanced physical models into CONVERGE and extend the range of applications that we can simulate. For example, we released the Lagrangian-Eulerian Spark Ignition (LESI) model in CONVERGE 4 this year, which was developed in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory. The LESI model provides a more realistic approach to simulate spark ignition in IC engines. The model was implemented in CONVERGE through a Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) project, which helps commercialize promising technologies developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratories. Argonne National Laboratory received a 2024 R&D Award for their development of the LESI model, highlighting the benefits of collaborations between industry and national labs.
2024 was also an exciting year for the Computational Chemistry Consortium (C3). Convergent Science is a founding member of C3, which is a collaboration between industry, government, and academic partners to develop and enhance computational chemistry mechanisms and tools. This year, we completed C3MechV4, the second major version of the detailed C3 mechanism. The new version of the mechanism includes a variety of updates and improvements, including expanded battery chemistry capabilities, more accurate hydrogen and ammonia combustion modeling, and enhanced and expanded hydrocarbon chemistry. C3MechV4 has been distributed to the consortium’s industry members and will be released publicly once published. Stay tuned for that announcement in the coming months!
Our efforts as part of the IMPACT (Initiative for Modeling Propulsion and Carbon-neutral Transport Technologies) consortium also continued during 2024. IMPACT was founded by Convergent Science, Aramco Americas, and Argonne National Laboratory with the goal of developing and demonstrating accelerated virtual engine and fuel methods for sustainable transport technologies. IMPACT now officially has 12 OEMs signed on, and we held two workshops this year to update the industry members on the consortium’s progress. Significant strides have been made in a variety of research areas: hydrogen IC engine modeling, including mixing, turbulent combustion, and chemistry; pre-chamber engine combustion modeling; and cold-start emissions and aftertreatment modeling. The aim of the consortium is to improve computational tools that will help OEMs more accurately assess and optimize mobility systems to help reduce emissions from the transportation and heavy-duty sectors.
This year, Convergent Science also got involved with the CFD General Notation System (CGNS) steering committee. CGNS is a standardized file format for the storage and retrieval of CFD output files. The utility of the CGNS format has been significantly limited, however, because it lacked documentation on particle data. This meant that if your simulation results included particle-laden flows or data created using a Lagrangian modeling approach, a different file format was required for exporting the data. We decided to take on this limitation, and in May 2024, we proposed an extension to the CGNS format to enable the export of particle data. Our proposed extension has been accepted, and will be released soon in the next version of CGNS. This extension should significantly increase the usefulness of this file format for the entire CFD community. We’re also excited to now be a part of the steering committee to help shape the future of the CGNS standard.
Partnering with universities is another key ingredient in Convergent Science’s recipe for success. We strongly believe in supporting the education of the next generation of engineers, and we’re thrilled to provide free and heavily discounted software licenses to universities around the globe through our CONVERGE Academic Program. Of course, working with brilliant academic researchers also helps us develop and validate CONVERGE’s modeling capabilities and helps us explore new application areas. We continued to expand our academic program in 2024, onboarding many new universities, new users, and new research groups. We’re also working to support the adoption of CONVERGE in the classroom, with a number of new universities integrating CONVERGE into their curriculum. This year, we saw a big increase in interest from new academic users focusing on rocket and aerospace applications, exciting research areas that are under active development in CONVERGE (hint: this is foreshadowing for version 5!).
Increasing the accessibility of advanced modeling tools is another initiative we’ve undertaken at Convergent Science. In 2023, we launched the CONVERGE Explore Program, which provides free CONVERGE licenses for non-commercial use, along with access to free training and learning resources. The goal of the program is to empower aspiring and established engineers to learn a new CFD software to expand their career opportunities. We’re excited to see the number of participants growing as the program continues in its second year—we’re now supporting CONVERGE Explore users in 33 countries around the world.
As we wrap up 2024, there’s a lot to look forward to in 2025. We’ll be releasing CONVERGE 5, which will contain a variety of new features that will enhance our software’s modeling capabilities for rockets, fuel cells, batteries, and biomedical applications, among many others. We’ll be hosting the second edition of the Hydrogen for Sustainable Mobility Forum with our partners in the SAE International Torino Section on March 11–12 at the Politecnico di Torino – Energy Center. We’ll be traveling the globe to attend trade shows and connect with clients, and we’ll be hosting the 2025 CONVERGE CFD Conference, hopefully breaking this year’s attendance record (keep an eye out for more information on this event!). We’re excited to make new breakthroughs in CFD technology and help our partners and collaborators achieve their research goals. Most of all, we’re looking forward to continuing on our mission to deliver the most accurate, efficient, and versatile CFD software on the market.
