Siemens Digital Industries Software continues to invest heavily in sharpening and honing its functionalities and bridging gaps in the Simcenter portfolio. Much of these bets relates to EDA (Electronic Design Automation) where the solutions are taking on Ansys and where the purchase of Altair will pose a threat to Ansys’ overall commercial leadership position on the CAE side. But as one of the heavy elements in the Simcenter portfolio, the company’s CFD multiphysics flagship STAR-CCM+ has also received its fair share of organic investments; in the latest version manifested in additions like GPU solvers and additive SPH methods (Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics) to expand its applicability, just to mentions a few enhancements in the upcoming 2025.2 version.
The strength of meshless CFD
Not least of all, the SPH pieces are interesting in this, says Ola Dahlin, explaining that they primarily provide the advantage of working in a meshless CFD environment, which speeds up the simulation of complex transient applications. Through this methodology, detailed insights into dynamic flows for multiple fluids can be obtained in a variety of disciplines, for example in the cooling of electric motors or water management in cars. Other benefits are that sophisticated analysis can be completed earlier in the development cycle.
“But the SPH method also generally reduces setup and solution times, and you can easily handle things like deformable and complex geometries,” says Dahlin, adding that this can also be automated to further hone the efficiency of the simulation. “With GPU acceleration, which comes with the new updated version, it is now possible to apply cases with moving objects for SPH.”
Bringing simulation data into the digital thread
Speaking of strengths, a significant one in this context is the Siemens Simcenter platform as part of the company’s overall PLM portfolio, Xcelerator.
The analyst CIMdata has pointed to Xcelerator and particularly emphasized its completeness, openness, and breadth as strong arguments for the portfolio’s suitability as a corporate platform for digital transformation. This means for the S&A area that, for example, the Simcenter platform and Teamcenter Simulation have capabilities that for both larger and smaller industrial companies brings along the capability to include simulation data in their digital threads.
The latter, digital threads, is of great importance, not least because simulation and analysis is growing in pace with the digitalization of product realization, as noted above. It also means that S&A is taking up an ever-increasing share of the overall product development process. But not only that, the use of S&A is spreading at an ever-increasing rate within several domains within the value chain, not least related to production and manufacturing. This in turn contributes to the increasing demands on the availability of data in order to get a good, holistic grasp of both the details and the whole in the product realization chain. How is this noticeable in the updated 2025.2 version? Ola Dahlin again:
“As always with our updates, the engineer’s work is in focus. From several perspectives, both in terms of Siemens as a supplier of the market’s strongest and broadest IT support and the simulation engineers as users; together, these pieces can streamline the work and provide additional opportunities to tackle new difficult challenges,” Ola Dahlin answers, adding that, “it can be about difficult physics or connecting two disciplines with each other in the analysis, for example fluid dynamics and structural dynamics, which in many cases is a challenging process for engineering teams, but which in return can provide better insight into the product’s performance in different ways.”
“Solving problems that are composed of different disciplines does not necessarily have to be something that is done in the same software or even by the same person, but that is how development looks and it always creates flows of information between different people and disciplines,” he argues further.
In this perspective, it is important for Siemens, Dahlin believes, “to provide engineers with the tools that make it easier to carry out the entire chain of analyses efficiently and precisely, but also repeatably and traceably, for this there are also tools in the Simcenter portfolio (Simcenter HEEDS) and also in Teamcenter. When we can contribute more effectively to model difficult or complex problems, the engineer will be able to deliver insights earlier in the process, further realizing the value of the expertise our customers build in simulation. There are many examples from our users both of how simulation is used earlier in development and how simulation of the product can be utilized when it is in production. And then not only to optimize product performance, but also optimization linked to manufacturing methods in the production.”
Virtual Body – method that shapes paint jobs and precision filling
More at the news front regarding STAR-CCM+ concerns the Virtual Body method, which shapes paint jobs and precision filling.
A fundamentally important step in the manufacture of a car is the electro-dipped paint coating of the body. In this, every detail is important. Entrained air forming from crevices or non-ideal motion as the car dips in may spoil the paint distribution and lead to bubbles and ugly artefacts on what was supposed to be a shiny surface. When you pull the car through a pool of paint, the way the paint flows, its viscosity and its surface tension determines how smoothly it coats the surface.
Ultimately, the secret behind the high quality of the final product lies in the interaction between a moving solid body (the car body) and a complex liquid (the paint pool). The task of ensuring that the related manufacturing processes are done correctly and without costly trial and error has a short answer: CFD simulation. But there is also a slightly longer answer to this: the Virtual Body method.
In a blog post on the Siemens website, Navid Hermidas writes more about this related to the updated version of STAR-CCM+ 2025.2:
“To model complex interactions between a moving solid body and a surrounding fluid, engineers rely on advanced CFD simulation techniques. More specifically, moving mesh technologies that allow to simulate the motion of a solid (boundary) inside its surrounding as it affects the fluid surrounding it.
An established method to achieve this is the overset approach. This technique provides both flexibility and accuracy by combining background and body-fitted meshes, but it comes with high computational costs and comparably complex setups. This is where the Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) shines—offering a powerful and efficient alternative. By embedding objects within a background mesh, IBM simplifies the simulation process while maintaining accuracy, reducing computational overhead, and improving scalability.
Now, for the first time, in the new version of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ 2502, a special flavor of IBM, known as the Virtual Body method (VBM), is available to tackle such challenging applications. From electro-dip coating to fluid filling of containers to pumping fluids and air, this method enables CFD simulation engineers to sift through their key performance indicators more quickly and easily, thereby reducing turn-around time.
How does the Virtual Body method work?
In the Virtual Body method, cell centroids located inside an object are deactivated, similar to the overset grid method. Subsequently, vertices near the newly established boundary are projected or snapped onto it.
This method is highly adaptable to meet varying accuracy requirements. By selecting input surfaces that define the virtual body (as shown in the image above), adaptive mesh refinement can be employed to attain the desired level of precision. For lower refinement levels, this approach enables the production of quick, lower fidelity CFD results, useful in the initial phases of design such as the conceptual design stage or preliminary assessments.
Alternatively, a boundary can be placed around the input geometry to represent the virtual body. Within this boundary, a body-fitted mesh can be generated, allowing users significant flexibility to create high-fidelity meshes, including prism layers. This approach can produce highly accurate results. Furthermore, adaptive mesh refinement can be utilized to precisely refine the mesh along the virtual boundary.”
“STAR-CCM+ are found in all industries”
In the introduction we discussed the industrial segments where STAR-CCM+, according to analysts, has its most important target groups. How does Ola Dahlin see this and what the software can generally do for them?
“Engineers who work with our tools are found in all industries where some form of development or verification of product performance is done. But to name one in particular, the industrial segment with pumps and turbomachinery (rotating machines) is an important part for Simcenter STAR-CCM+, here you often find the combination of being able to handle complex geometries with many constituent parts or being able to quickly and efficiently replace geometry parts from CAD or build your own geometry parts inside Simcenter STAR-CCM+ using our 3D modeling technology. A strength of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is precisely its efficient geometry management and in combination with the ability to perform sometimes very advanced analyses, it fits very well in the hands of engineers in turbomachinery and pumps,” concludes Ola Dahlin.
