Adapt is a high-end code for modeling very large aerospace problems on a mainframe or supercomputer. Set to be released this spring, Adapt evolved from code Oden's company originally developed for NASA and the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. Adapt uses h-adaptive methods, where the mesh is automatically refined in different areas according to their complexity.

To date, Adapt has been used for analyzing and designing chemical lasers for the Air Force Weapons Lab. At the NASA Lewis Research Center, an early version of the code performed rotor and stator calculations for turbine engines. Computation Mechanics Co. is in the final stages of putting together an Adapt version for the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (Huntsville, Ala.) that will model incompressible flows in propulsion systems.

First Cut

Automatic meshing techniques that would cut the amount of time users must spend fine-tuning geometries may also be on the way from Fluid Dynamics International. According to company president Michael Engelman, Fidap will incorporate the feature in some form within a year. Fuller adaptive meshing capabilities would follow in later releases.