FORCE Technology is leading the development of a Danish open source software platform for computational fluid dynamics. Eight Danish companies and two universities have combined their efforts to become a serious alternative to commercial programs.
In recent years, CFD has been more and more extensively used within Danish industry, but the use of commercial programs for CFD calculations has proved to be a growing challenge for many companies. Among the reasons are the lack of competition, which has resulted in sky-high commercial licence prices, and the fact that it is virtually impossible to exchange data between companies using different programs.
Expanding the number of users
Thus the purpose of the skills platform is to develop and assure the quality of open source CFD programs for a growing number of companies in fields like processing equipment, micro and nanotechnology, the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, the maritime industry and the oil and gas industry.
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Graphic image of CFD calculation of SCR facility for cleaning of flue gas. |
More resources required
However, greater resources are required on the part of companies using open source programs compared with the commercially available programs; user support is less, the manuals lack proper development and considerably greater resources are required to familiarise users with the programs.
“It has been extremely important to establish a forum of member companies and training institutions, each of which contributes input to the open source CFD programs. For instance, it means that we can divide tasks consisting of three tests among three different parties instead of a single company having to deal with all three of them. This really speeds up the process while making workloads easier to deal with”, says Henrik Hassing from FORCE Technology.
Participants
Besides FORCE Technology, which is responsible for the project, Grundfos Management, Niro, MAN Diesel, Ødegaard & Danneskiold-Samsøe, Babcock & Wilcox Vølund, Haldor Topsøe, FLSmidth Airtech, the University of Aalborg and the Technical University of Denmark are also participating.
The project will run for a period of 18 months and has received a grant of DKK 3.44 million from the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation.
