Each year Siemens provides us with three Simcenter STAR-CCM+ releases, and the first one for 2026 is coming up! This first release of 2026 is filled with performance and “quality of life” improvements. Here we highlight a small sample of the many features that we feel might be interesting for you.

Making waves with GPU computing
GPU computing has a recurring theme throughout the latest releases, bringing significant speedups in computation time for an increasing number of physics models and applications! Simcenter STAR-CCM+ 2602 brings GPU computing to Volume of Fluid (VOF) and Mixture Multiphase (MMP) modelling. Both VOF and MMP are used to simulate complex multiphase phenomena such as waves, boiling and mixing, to name but a few, and are used extensively by Femto and many of our clients. GPU support for these methods (including MMP-LSI, adaptive timestep and sub-stepping, surface tension modelling, etc.) is now native, bringing computation times down to an equivalent of 200 CPU cores with a modern GPU and at a lower energy cost. This means a significant increase in the applicability of GPU hardware for partners active in the maritime, offshore, process and many other industries.

The example above was used in a benchmark which showed that for this sloshing case a single GPU (NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada) was faster than 192 CPU cores (AMD EPYC 7532) while using significantly less energy. Other native GPU additions in this release include the segregated species solver, non-spherical DEM particles and the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings model (used in acoustic simulations).

Show off your simulations with web viewer improvements
Sharing insights and results with other people and organisations remains one of the most important and challenging aspects for simulation engineers. The introduction of the web viewer provided us with a very powerful tool that allows us to share simulation plots and scenes with an interactive web viewer that can be used to view results in an intuitive and easy manner. We are very happy to announce that the capabilities of this tool have been expanded.
The tool now accepts simulation layouts which allow an engineer to showcase a combination of scenes and plots which aid each other in telling interrelated stories. This addition greatly increases the communicative potential of the web viewer.

Another seemingly simple yet major improvement is the addition of an adjustable colour bar where the user can change the data range from the web viewer client. Giving this additional control to the viewer improves the usability of with large and complex simulations that are hard to visualise with a single fixed colour bar.

Improve the predictions of wall-bound flows
The 2602 release comes with a number of new features that help with modelling wall-bound flows. As with any simulation, we start with the geometry. Accurate predictions of wall-bound flows require high surface quality, which can be a lot of work to obtain. The STAR-CCM+ 2602 CAD environment now comes with a new clean-up operation, the “Remove Logos” feature (which can be found under Repair Tools). This feature allows fast removal of embossed geometry such as logos and lettering, reducing the need for multiple clean and defeature operations.

Now that we have a clean surface, we can apply the Enhanced Quality Prisms mesher option to discretise our fluid domain. This new option is introduced to improve the boundary layer mesh quality in concave and convex corners, where prism layers are typically retraced. This new prim layer mesh option prevents mesh retraction in corners, which allows the prism mesher to advance further into the domain, creating thicker boundary layers. This improves both the velocity and thermal gradients for wall-bound flows and speeds up convergence due to the increase in cell quality.

Discover more
Of course, this is only a selection of features from the latest update that Femto thinks is important for your everyday workflow. Follow this link to the Siemens article about all these exciting new features that may also apply to your Simcenter STAR-CCM+ workflow.

Need more information?

We would gladly look together with you at which software suits the wishes and needs of you and your company. Through the form below you can contact us directly, we will get back to you as soon as possible for an appointment.

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