Madison, WisconsinㅡSeptember 14, 2018ㅡConvergent Science is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the commercial release of their flagship product, CONVERGE CFD software. Founded in 1997 by a handful of graduate students from the University of WisconsinㅡMadison, Convergent Science is a rapidly growing, international computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software company with over 100 employees.
CFD software is used to analyze complex problems involving fluid flow. Inspired by their time spent at the Engine Research Center at UW-Madison, Kelly Senecal, Eric Pomraning, Keith Richards, and Daniel Leeㅡall co-founders and co-owners of Convergent Scienceㅡoriginally developed CONVERGE to model combustion and flow in internal combustion engines for use in the automotive industry. They learned many of the skills they used to create their software during their graduate studies with the UW-Madison Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Convergent Science released the first commercial version of CONVERGE in 2008. Although it was initially difficult to compete with large, established CFD software companies, CONVERGE is now the leading CFD software for modeling internal combustion engines worldwide. Engine and automotive manufacturers use CONVERGE to help them design cleaner, more efficient engines to reduce environmentally harmful emissions. In addition, CONVERGE is increasingly used for other applications, such as simulating gas turbines, exhaust aftertreatment, pumps, and compressors.
Convergent Science is headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin with additional offices in Texas, Michigan, Austria, and India. It was important to the owners of Convergent Science to keep the world headquarters in Madison.
"Madison is a great city that attracts a lot of really talented people," said co-owner Kelly Senecal. "We're very invested in Madison, and we're thrilled to be a part of the community here."
Convergent Science will celebrate ten years of CONVERGE at their CONVERGE User Conference in Madison, which will take place September 24-28. Convergent Science hosts two user conferences every year, one in North America and one in Europe, designed to bring CONVERGE users together to share their latest research and discuss challenging CFD problems. The CONVERGE User Conferences consist of technical presentations, CONVERGE training, and networking events, and the upcoming conference in Madison will also include a ten-year celebration on September 25 at the historic Orpheum Theater on State Street.
"We're very proud of what we've accomplished at Convergent Science," said Senecal, "but I think the best part of owning the company is seeing our employees prosper and grow into world-class developers and engineers. That's what makes it fun to come into work everyday."