The military-industrial scientific research system of the academic master.

Similar scenes, of course, did not only happen at Ohio State University.

Just as Professor Harold guessed, many people followed Chang Haonan’s account on arXiv a year ago.

After the latter posts a dynamic, the follower's mailbox will immediately receive a reminder email——

Originally, functions like this might have to wait a few more days until the Internet era fully arrives before they can be launched.

But because of Chang Haonan's sudden appearance, the technicians at Cornell University's Tech campus were "forced" to develop this function in advance...

That’s why thousands of people clicked in to view it within just ten minutes.

You should know that arXiv is not a self-media. Although there is no threshold for registration, its content inherently excludes most people outside the academic community.

Even among scholars, not everyone was proficient in using the Internet in 2001.

Besides, everyone is very busy and it is impossible for us to spend all day on the Internet like an idle person.

Therefore, being able to achieve a four-digit reading volume in a short period of time is already an amazing communication efficiency.

However, not everyone holds the same mentality as Harold.

Later.

Stanford University, San Francisco.

Professor Anthony Jameson was frowning slightly as he looked at the PDF document displayed on the computer screen.

Naturally, it is the preprint paper published by Chang Haonan.

But unlike Harold, there were several other people dressed similarly sitting next to him.

They are from the Swedish company COMSOL and are responsible for the development of the COMSOL Multiphysics numerical computing software.

In fact, COMSOL has long recognized the potential of multi-physics simulation tools. Svante Littmarck, one of its founders, began to write similar modules based on the MATLAB software that had just been commercialized in the mid-to-late 80s.

Unfortunately, it was still in the early stages of the development of computer application science, and only top universities or super large companies such as Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and IBM could apply computers on a large scale in their work.

Everyone has an idol image and wants to develop their own application software independently.

You mean outsourcing software?

I can't afford to lose that person!

Therefore, the road to commercialization of COMSOL products has not been smooth.

In this regard, it is China's universities and research institutions that have limited capabilities and know they do not have the ability to develop software independently, thus providing Torch Group with a huge amount of commercial space.

In the true sense, "rapid progress is due to a low starting point" is true.

It was not until TORCH MUltiphysics was released and began to seize the market with its absolute performance advantage that the MATLAB commercial toolkit named FEMLAB was launched in 1998, and was renamed COMSOL Multiphysics a year later in 1999.

It was precisely in order to quickly catch up with the forerunners that COMSOL hired Anthony Jameson as its chief technology officer at a high salary.

Before the name Chang Haonan appeared, Anthony Jameson could be said to be one of the greatest names in the field of CFD, especially in the field of finite volume method.

Since the 70s, he has developed a series of CFD-related core algorithms for companies and institutions such as Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, NASA, French Aerospace, and Dornier.

In particular, he wrote a code framework called FLO to predict ideal transonic flow on swept wings, and based on it, he developed the most successful CFD software "A90" for Boeing before the 488s.

The latter is the core computing tool in the development process of Boeing 757, 767 and 777.

It can be said that during that period, Jameson’s role in Boeing was almost similar to Chang Haonan’s role in China today…

After such a big boss joined COMSOL, he indeed produced almost immediate results.

In 1999, the newly renamed COMSOL software was almost overwhelmed by its competitors and could only survive at ultra-low prices in some universities that could not afford TORCH Multiphysics.

Just less than two years later, the newly released COMSOL Multiphysics 2.0 has achieved more than 9% of the efficiency of its competitors in the electromagnetics-structural mechanics-fluid mechanics modules.

Although according to industry consensus, TORCH Multiphysics definitely has a "professional upgraded version" with more powerful performance, it has not been publicly released and does not constitute commercial competition.

Therefore, in recent months, COMSOL has managed to grab a lot of market share by relying on its high cost-performance ratio and its status as a pure European company.

Especially some small and medium-sized start-ups and research institutions that are willing to try various new things.

Although it is a bit embarrassing that as a European company, it has fallen to the point where it can only win by relying on cost-effectiveness.

But making money.

Not shabby.

However, before they could breathe a sigh of relief, they discovered that the developers of TORCH Multiphysics seemed to have come up with something new...

This feeling of oppression is simply enough to make one's scalp tingle.

Therefore, the group rushed to Stanford without even having time to eat lunch to ask Professor Jameson for coping strategies.

"Professor, what do you think?"

Klaus Hirsch, COMSOL's permanent representative in the United States, looked at Jameson, who had remained silent for a long time, and tentatively broke the silence.

“Very nice model.”

Jameson came up with a word of praise.

This almost gave Hirsch a heart-and-lung pause.

However, the former immediately changed the subject:

“But that’s only in theory.”

All I can say is that Jameson knows how to first praise someone before suppressing him.

Hirsch, who had experienced a lot of ups and downs in less than a second, had no time to complain about this and quickly asked:

"So, professor, what you mean is that... there are still many difficulties in implementing this algorithm?"

"Yes."

Jameson let go of the mouse and turned to look at Heltz who was sitting not far behind him:

"Using LSM, or the level set method, to simulate evaporation, atomization, and combustion on a deformable interface is indeed closer to reality than empirical vapor layer models and simple heat transfer models."

"But in terms of specific algorithm implementation... traditional meshing, I mean, even moving meshes such as the Lagrangian meshing method, are difficult to meet the requirements of this paper for mesh generation accuracy and speed."

"You know, most two-phase flow interfaces change rapidly over time. The original LSM method is not strictly conservative and cannot guarantee accuracy in long-term simulations of more than 1 second."

"Although Professor Chang's new algorithm achieves conservation when dealing with two-phase flow problems with divergent free velocity fields, its generation efficiency in the Cartesian coordinate system is reduced..."

At this point, the former took off his glasses and rubbed his sore eyes:

"Of course, this paper is still a preprint, and it doesn't cover much about the specific implementation process of the algorithm. But unless the computing speed of computers is improved by 3-4 orders of magnitude compared to now, there is definitely no way to solve the CFD problem under long wheelbase time parameters. So I guess the author may have found some specific conditions as an example to get such a beautiful result in the article..."

"You know, even for the NS equation, people have found hundreds of analytical solutions under specific circumstances. Given Professor Chang's mathematical level, I think this is not difficult..."

"..."

It should be said that Jameson is worthy of being the best CFD expert of the last era.

In just twenty minutes, he saw the weakest part of Chang Haonan's paper.

That is, the mesh generation efficiency in the Cartesian coordinate system.

But after all, they are CFD experts from the "last era".

There was still a misjudgment of the power of the new technology in the new era...

Of course, at this point in time, Hertz must still be happy:

“So, our next work…”

"Proceed as usual."

Professor Jameson answered decisively:

"My Synplane model has entered the final and most critical optimization stage. Judging from the current results, using the traditional finite volume method, fixing the coordinate system describing the fluid on the fluid particles and allowing them to move with the fluid can achieve the effect of accurately tracking the interface evolution process."

"My research group is currently trying to reconstruct the grid topology to solve the distortion problem caused by this process. However, we need to introduce special node search technology to determine the node adjacency relationship. This part of the work is a bit complicated, but it should be promoted for commercial application by the end of this year at the latest."

Facing the Torch Group, which is in a dominant position, in addition to its cost-effective strategy, another important advantage of COMSOL Multiphysics is its extremely fast update frequency.

More than a year after its official launch, the second major version was released.

Especially for industry-leading functions, as long as they can pass performance testing, we will put them in first.

This is very attractive to most research institutions.

TORCH Multiphysics is completely the opposite. After the official version 1.0 was released, only three small-scale updates were pushed out in total. However, its performance is extremely stable. As long as you follow the operating manual, there will be almost no oscillation or divergence.

However, this also means that COMSOL must maintain this high-intensity update, so the business pressure is very high.

They plan to push another major update at the end of 2001, raising the software version number to 2.5.

Synplane, a model that can simultaneously perform fluid mechanics and structural mechanics optimization design on the entire aircraft, is the "trump card" of version 2.5.

Therefore, after hearing this assurance, Hertz's tense expression finally relaxed.