Incorporated on Monday December 19th 1987, the day known to the rest of the world as “Black Monday”, Computational Dynamics faced an uneasy birth. Unsurprisingly, as the world’s stock markets crashed around them, Gosman and Issa initially struggled to find investors willing to fund their start-up company, in what was still a relatively obscure corner of the technology market. That funding would eventually come from adapco, a New York based structural engineering consultancy company, which had been performing structural analysis of engine cylinder heads. adapco had recently turned to CFD simulation as a mechanism for providing more accurate heat-transfer coefficients boundary conditions for their FEA simulations, but had been frustrated by the fact that none of the commercial codes offered the body-fitted methodologies required to provide results with enough accuracy. adapco’s President Steve MacDonald was introduced to Prof. Gosman by a mutual contact at the Ford Motor Company, and quickly determined that Gosman’s CFD code would not-only solve his heat transfer coefficient problems, it would also provide a useful tool for the water-jacket flow-balancing simulations that some of his customers were demanding.

With adapco’s backing, Computational Dynamics set about producing a commercial version of their body-fitted CFD code named STAR-CD (which stands for Simulating Transport in Arbitrary Regions). The first version was block-structured but, by its second release in 1991, STAR-CD had become the first truly unstructured commercial code, offering engineers the ability to construct meshes from any combination of hexahedral, tetrahedral and prismatic cells and thereby providing unparalleled geometrical flexibility. Technology that had been developed for SPEED also made its way into STAR-CD, and it quickly became the default CFD code for the simulation of engine combustion problems.

More than 25 years after its first release, STAR-CD is still going strong, and continues to occupy a leading position in the engine simulation market. The vast majority of engines developed since the early 1990s have been designed and numerically tested with the aid of STAR-CD, providing insight that has allowed engine manufacturers to significantly reduce both fuel consumption and emissions. Computational Dynamics and adapco now jointly trade under the name CD-adapco, and collectively employ more than 800 people in developing and supporting STAR-CD and their next-generation CFD tool STAR-CCM+.

Despite the success of this commercial venture, Gosman remained dedicated to his academic work, and was appointed Professor of CFD at Imperial College in 1988, evetually publishing over 200 papers on CFD. In the same way that Spalding’s group eventually spawned multiple CFD codes including TEACH, the current leading Open Source CFD code FOAM (now OpenFOAM) was developed by Dr Henry Weller during his time in Prof. Gosman’s research team.

Until recently Prof. Gosman could proudly confess that, despite a whole career spent pioneering, developing and educating with CFD tools, he had never actually performed a CFD calculation using a commercial CFD code. However, he was recently observed participating in “STAR-CCM+ for beginners” training class. Maybe this is his greatest legacy: after more than 40 years of development CFD tools are now so accessible that even a CFD Icon can learn how to use them.

[1] Gosman A D (Editor), Heat and Mass Transfer in Recirculating Flows, 1969, ISBN 0122919505

[2] Gosman A D, Launder B E, Reece GJ, Computer-aided Engineering, Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow, 1985, ISBN 0853128669

[3] Runchal A K, Brian Spalding: CFD and reality, Proc. CHT-08, ICHMT – International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer, International Symposium on Advances in Computational Heat Transfer, 2008

[4] Hirschell E H (Editor), Notes on Numerical Fluid Mechanics: 40 Years of Numerical Fluid Mechanics and Aerodynamics in Retrospect, 2009, ISBN 3540708049

[5] Gosman A D and Johns R J R, Development of a predictive tool for in-cylinder gas motion in engines, in SAE International Congress, 1978, paper 7803l5