Fluent, Inc.

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Fluent Inc. is a company based in Lebanon, New Hampshire that develops software for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Fluent was founded in 1988 as a spin-off from Hanover, New Hampshire based Creare, Inc., a research and development firm. On February 16, 2006, Fluent and ANSYS announced that ANSYS will acquire Fluent for US$ 565 Million.

The primary product of Fluent, Inc. is a general purpose CFD software package called FLUENT. The software code is based on the finite volume method on a collocated grid. FLUENT incorporates dynamic meshing, meaning that the user simply sets up the initial mesh and prescribes the motion, while FLUENT automatically changes the mesh to follow the motion prescribed. This is useful for modeling flow conditions in and around moving objects.

Furthermore, FLUENT has built-in acoustics modeling capability that lets users perform "on-the-fly" sound calculations. Moreover, FLUENT’s flow modeling functionality has expanded with efficient handling of realistic, turbulent, finite-rate chemistry and accurate modeling of complex surface chemistry. Eulerian multiphase simulation capabilities for FLUENT have been extended to address heat and mass transfer.

In addition to FLUENT, Fluent, Inc. also produces a variety of additional CFD software and tools, including

GAMBIT, a geometric modeling and grid generation tool often shipped with FLUENT
TGRID, a mesh generator for generating unstructured mesh from defined surface mesh, also usually shipped with FLUENT
POLYFLOW, a finite-element based CFD package for the analysis of polymer processing and glass forming
FIDAP, a finite-element based flow modeling tool for applications such as polymer processing, thin film coating, biomedical, semiconductor crystal growth, and metallurgy.