Simcenter Femap vs. Simcenter STAR-CCM+

A brilliant tool to use for complex FE Analysis beyond the scope of design checks.

Incentivized

The applications that I have been using it with in terms of flow and energy and temperature distributions and coupled solvers, segregated solvers, these kind of areas if you need that, those kind of solvers, it's very good. It's very robust. Maybe on the combustion side, it could improve, especially if you have these kind of tabulated solvers that you want to use, not the detailed chemistry, then it becomes very difficult to get some results from it. And do you trust the results or not? That's always the question on that kind of application, something that I could think of really fast.

Incentivized

• Simcenter Femap is well linked with NX Nastran such that the .dat file can be manipulated from within the software
• The API interface makes it highly automatized

Incentivized

• Meshing, for instance, it's very easy to mesh, try different approaches to meshing. Traditionally that's a very difficult job, but in STAR-CCM+ it makes it very easy and very reliable. Post-processing also is very nice and in all the modeling, the physics that you can carry out and you can simulate is also very, very nice. I tried to move to the priorities that does a good job. All in all, it's a very good software.

Incentivized

• Some versions are prematurely released containing many bugs

Incentivized

• Implementing physics like Cox-Voinov model
• Mesh related stability issues
• Chemical & plasma physics
• Integration with other products from Siemens (similar level as we have with Abacus)
• Speed up the lagrangian solver
• Improved guidence on uFluidics & evaporation models
• Interoperability (HEEDS, AMEsim, System Modelling Workbench but also with non siemens products and open source codes required for LBM, DSMC, PIC, DFT...

Great single window GUI

Incentivized

Our designated support engineers do a proper job. On the outdated Help file and training material there is a lot to gain

It is super easy when it comes to implementing it.

Incentivized

• Quick turn around time for Analyses

Incentivized

• Time saved in creating a inhouse code, tens and tens of hours.
• Time saved in experimental setup, tens of hours.
• Does add some time in testing to confirm star is doing what you think it's doing, but an overall net gain in productivity.