Design of Smartfish As a designer of the next generation aircraft, I had a dilemma. There is little known about configurations of aircraft like SmartFish. The only solution to proceed was with CFD. Therefore I needed a CFD application that will work on all flight regimes (from low subsonic to high transonic) for up to high angle of attack conditions. I've experimented with a few known flow solvers and decided to work with CFD++ from Metacomp Technologies.  CFD++ provided the accuracy I needed, and this with very little influence of the mesh. The other solvers often got different results for the same design when the mesh was not exactly identical. SmartFish is not like a conventional aircraft, it has a very low drag count, so these variations in drag were too important to be accepted. With CFD++ this problem is solved. Another advantage is the speed of CFD++. The convergence of the runs is much faster than with other solvers. This is very important for a start-up company with limited CPU. The speed and reliability of CFD++ made it possible to develop the design of SmartFish in an evolutionary way. All the simulations of SmartFish have been done on a workstation with 2GB of RAM, including the calculations with high AoA. Different designs got analyzed with CFD++. The best one of these designs was then chosen as base for the next iteration step in the design process. Design 10 was tested in the wind tunnel of Ruag Aerospace, and the results were exactly as predicted by CFD++, including the flight regime with vortex lift flying high AoA! Very important for success with CFD is also the support. It was and is always possible to get support immediately from Metacomp Technologies. Let's say it this way: Without CFD++ from Metacomp Technologies, it would not have been possible to develop the design of SmartFish. Kind regards, Koni   Koni can be reached at :  koni.schafroth@smartfish.ch His web-site: www.smartfish.ch