Comparison of effects on technical variances of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software based on finite element and finite volume methods

Recently, many studies for flow characteristics have used commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to simulate flow phenomena in various fields. The aim of this study is to contribute to the discussion on the efficiency of finite element (FE) and finite volume (FV) methods, which have mainly used as CFD solvers for situations with the same number of mesh elements and geometries. We compared the accuracy of the results and the flow patterns among three different commercial codes – Ansys CFX, Fluent and ADINA, which are used in many fields. We calculated three-dimensional incompressible laminar flow problems with simple pipe and bifurcation models. Our results showed that FEM CFD codes (ADINA) were more influenced by the mesh type and quality compared to FVM CFD codes (Ansys CFX, Fluent). The computation time was found to be significantly shorter for the FVM compared to the FEM codes. •Comparison of commercial CFD software based on the FEM and FVM.•FVM software (CFX and Fluent) showed similar results regardless of the mesh type.•FCBI based on FEM in ADINA was influenced by the mesh type used.•FCBI-C based on FVM in ADINA showed similar results for different mesh types.•The FEM code would need to consider the mesh type, quality, and number of mesh.