Rockfield Software - World leaders in Advanced Finite Element -

The Company

Rockfield is a high technology company established to provide leading edge numerical based simulation systems and their industrial applications. It has an International Client base with interests in a diverse range of industrial disciplines (including basic engineering, hydrocarbon applications, foods, manufacturing, geotechnical, defence, etc).

Rockfield is based in Swansea, UK, with offices in Australia (Queensland) and recently in USA (Maryland).

Objectives

The principal aim of Rockfield is to provide industry with support of advanced technology problems through computational modelling. To meet this objective, the company is committed to computational developments and applications in both existing and emerging disciplines and the undertaking of collaborative research programmes with industry, universities and research organisations.

Products and Services

Rockfield offers a range of services aimed at providing support to industry over most facets of operation. By recognising the different, and individual, needs of organisations, ranging from SMEs to international conglomerates, Rockfield provides the following services either separately or as an integrated decision support facility:

Consultancy Service to provide computational solutions to individual industrial problems.

Customised Software Development to provide computational modelling for specific applications or processes not amenable to treatment by standard software.

Standard software for the simulation of a wide range of industrial problems.

Current Developments & Future Directions

Rockfield’s activities extend beyond the more traditional boundaries of finite element methods and several current areas of work are driven by demands in industry for developments in multi-scale, multi-physics applications, some examples of which are provided below:

Particulate and discontinuous materials. Treatment of particulate flows in food processing and mining operations, etc. Modelling of masonry and other discontinuous structures.

Multi-fracturing solids. Modelling of the progressive transformation of solids to a discontinuous particulate medium due to blast, impact or crushing operations, etc.

Solid-fluid coupling under static/dynamic conditions; including situations of coupling between multi-fracturing solids and interacting fluid fields.

Micromechanical phenomena. Modelling of single crystal plastic deformation, micromechanical treatment of friction and wear, etc.

Hydrocarbon Applications Including the modelling of expandable completions under field conditions, evolution of salt diapirs, reservoir and surface subsidence, fault reactivation.

Technological developments are being made to support these advances including:

sparse matrix solvers for the solution of large scale problems,

parallel processing procedures for use on shared/distributed memory hardware configurations and

virtual reality immersive environment to permit user controlled visualisation of dynamic events.

Research Links

The company, which was formed in 1985, is located within an Innovation Centre based on the campus of the University of Wales Swansea. It has strong links with the Institute for Numerical Methods in Engineering (INME), Department of Civil Engineering which is pre-eminent in research in computational modelling in general and the finite element method in particular.

INME has been engaged in fundamental research into finite element methods for more than 30 years and many of the cornerstones of the technique, which are to be found in the major commercial codes, were developed at Swansea. Links between Rockfield and INME take the form of sponsorship of research staff and students and the undertaking of collaborative research programmes.