CD-adapco today announced the release of the latest version of their flagship Computational Fluid Dynamics package, STAR-CD.STAR-CD V4 brings new state-of-the-art solver technology to the STAR-CD community, without compromising the advanced modeling and complex physics capabilities for which STAR-CD is the undisputed market leader. By using the latest polyhedron-based finite volume technology, STAR-CD V4 delivers significant benefits in speed, robustness and usability.
Benefits include:

• Polyhedral cells: STAR-CD V4 is fully polyhedra-enabled. Polyhedral meshes are as easy to build as those of tetrahedra however, compared to tetrahedral meshes, polyhedral meshes are more accurate, use less memory, converge faster and require fewer cells in order to obtain the same level of accuracy.
  
• Improved Free Surface Analysis: STAR-CD V4 introduces state-of the-art free surface modeling, an improvement on the technology previously used extensively throughout the marine industry in COMET.
  
• Extra Transient Options: Extending STAR-CD’s market leading transient capabilities with the addition of a new solution algorithm and high-order discretisation scheme.
  
• New Liquid Film model: Reinforcing STAR-CD’s leading spray modeling with this state-of-the-art liquid film implementation.
  
• Memory management: STAR-CD V4 is fully 64 bit compatible and includes improved dynamic memory handling, further easing the solution of very large calculations.
  
  

Steve MacDonald explains that this release represents a payoff for CD-adapco’s decision to invest heavily in solver technology: "While other CFD vendors are content to simply build upon their existing aging software architectures, with STAR-CCM+ and now STAR-CD V4, we have achieved our aim of basing all of our solutions on the most advanced solver technology available.”