ACADEMIA

Fluent Inc., world leader in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software and services, today announces the winners of its second annual "CFD User of the Year" Awards. These Awards again recognize five specific areas of applied CFD usage from the many studies and papers submitted to Fluent Inc. -- Most Innovative Use of CFD Technology: This award was won by Ricardo Baudille from the University of Rome, Italy, for his industrially relevant fluid-structure interaction simulations of deforming Formula 1 racecar wings and fluttering aircraft wings. -- Most Impact of CFD on Society: Maciej Ginalski from the Silesian University of Technology in Poland won this award for his pioneering PhD work on hospital incubator design improvements. His work will increase the chances of premature babies surviving after birth. -- Most Impact of CFD on a Business Process: Marcus Trenker and Wolfgang Payer from the Arsenal Research Center in Austria won this award for their excellent work on modeling snow and ice build-up near train undercarriage vents during winter conditions. They subsequently retrofitted existing train designs for a customer to prevent snow accretion being a problem and minimizing the amount of time trains might be out of service. -- Best Use of CFD as a Design Tool: This award was won by Silvestre Ariaga-Hahn of Opel GmbH, Germany, for his customized external aerodynamics design tool, OVAL, that has helped cut the design cycle time for new Opel production saloon cars from 30 to 20 months. -- Best Industrial CFD Study: Wayne Strasser from Voridian Inc., USA, won this award for his comprehensive CFD modeling work on a complex Gear Mixing Pump used in plastics manufacturing whose mixing characteristics and performance were hitherto little understood. "This year, yet again, we have been impressed by the quality of candidate papers for these Awards," said Dr. Michael Engelman, chair of the Judging Panel and Corporate Vice President of Fluent Inc. "The winning papers in each category stood out very clearly to us. All five of them demonstrated pragmatic solution strategies to real-world engineering situations especially with the way they used CFD codes as tools to answer complex problems. We are pleased to recognize these world class CFD studies for their impact on our everyday world." To read the winning papers and to find out more about the authors, the judges and how to submit an Entry for the 2006 CFD User of the Year Awards, visitits Web site