About CPFD Software, LLC

CPFD Software, LLC is recognized as a global technology pioneer having successfully commercialized its unique engineering software: computationa particle-fluid dynamics (CPFD^®) across international automotive, chemical, petrochemical and power generation industries. Headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the company develops and distributes a uniquely capable family of computer-aided-engineering (CAE) software products. This engineering software is now employed by the major automotive and transportation manufacturers, as well as by the major chemical and petrochemical companies in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Customers include General Motors, Ford, Caterpillar, Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemicals, Millennium Chemicals, Alstom Power, DowCorning, Sony, Idemitsu Kosan, and Sandia National Laboratories.

The software company was founded in 1997 by owners Dr. Kenneth A. Williams, P.E., and Dr. Dale M. Snider. Today they lead a team of talented engineers and computer programmers in the development and marketing of the company’s high tech CPFD software, and in providing engineering services based on the application of its several CAE products.

Why is it called CPFD? Invented at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, computational fluid dynamics, called “CFD”, is a mathematical expression of the physics of the movements of fluids, that is liquids and gases. CFD computer software simulates real-world fluid-flow events, such as modeling the flow of air over an aircraft wing, or predicting the flow of an oil spill in a river channel. Sand in an hour glass is said to “flow”, and so for many years CFD computer codes were used to model and predict the movement of particles as well as fluids. But particles are solids, not fluids (imagine picking up a handful of sand and a handful of water). CPFD Software has solved the long-standing problem of how to incorporate the correct physics of the movement of solid particles together with (transporting) fluids, resulting in its unique CPFD numerical simulation technology.

The idea for the original CPFD numerical technique was incubated with assistance from General Motors, NASA and Auburn University. The sand foundry industry struggled for years with a high scrap rate of metal casting due to poorly made sand cores over which molten metal is poured, such as in the case of casting engine blocks. The Arena-flow® software (arena is Latin for sand) was developed to model the flow of sand into the sand core molds to assist engineers in determining why sand cores were not consistently of high quality. This was the first commercial product available using the breakthrough CPFD technology to visualize and understand these failures. Foundry engineers are now able to evaluate alternative adjustments to their core making tooling on the desktop to determine the optimum performance set up. This development also lets design engineers test and optimize new designs for cast products in advance to minimize sand core defects and, therefore, casting scrap. Less scrap means more high quality product to market faster for less cost, including significant energy savings. The Arena-flow product is owned by Arena-flow, LLC and also sublicensed worldwide by Ashland, Inc., in Columbus, Ohio.

CPFD Software then extended its fundamental CPFD technology into new application areas. The SeeFOAM CAE product is used by General Motors and others to simulate the production of expanded polystyrene foam patterns; quality patterns are critical to the energy-efficient lost foam casting process pioneered by GM, as well as to the broader shape-and-block foam molding industry.

The company’s most important product is the Barracuda software for the chemical, petrochemical and power generation industries, with their ubiquitous usage of gas-solids processes. Various forms of a gas/solids process are widely employed for the production of gasoline, plastics, nylon, specialty chemicals/pigments and even the gasification of coal and wood. Barracuda models the complex mixing and reacting process within large industrial units, such as ‘cat crackers’, dense-bed reactors, regenerators, ore reactors, and cyclones. Continuous product improvement includes collaboration with ExxonMobil, Millennium Inorganic Chemicals, and Sandia National Labs under a Department of Energy’s Industrial Technology Partnership program researching improved operation and process intensification in dense-phase gas-solid fluidized bed reactors, with broad extensions to catalysis, gas-solid separations, nanotechnology, power plants and combustion. This breakthrough CPFD technology will quickly lead to more, and less costly, production of gasoline by the petrochemical companies, and to reduce energy consumption for the production of TiO2, the ubiquitous pigment used in paint.

CPFD Software, LLC is a fast growing technology company producing some of the most commercially beneficial, and unique, engineering software in the world today. Significant opportunities exist for expanding on the company’s current success and with new applications: reducing energy consumption and increasing output at oil refineries, designing new gasifier technology using coal or biomass, making economically viable the tar sands in Canada, increasing ‘clean coal’ energy production with CFB combustors, designing new chemical plants as they move to new feedstocks (away from petroleum), and improving component reliability (e.g. cyclones and spargers), producing and distributing pharmaceuticals, transporting harmful air-born particulates, and indeed to almost any industrial process invoving movement of solid particles by a gas or liquid. CPFD Software, LLC is a leading member of the engineering software community, focused on helping industries worldwide with their particle flow problems.