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The Founders

During our studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we came into contact with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for the first time. We were fascinated by the numerous possibilities and applications of this highly interdisciplinary topic and wanted to find out more.

Dr.-Ing. Max Gaedtke
Managing Director
Dr.-Ing. Marc Haußmann
Managing Director
Malte Reimann
Finance and Sales
Markus Mohrhard
Technical Advisor

We decided to do a PhD in the Lattice Boltzmann Research Group at the Chair of Mechanical Process Engineering and Mechanics. In our doctoral theses, we researched and further developed various applications of LBM for industrial applications. Through our experience we recognized the great potential of this methodology. We wanted to make sure that our knowledge would not disappear in an “academic” drawer after our doctorate, but that its application to industrial problems would provide great value. This was the birth of cloudfluid.

The cloudfluid GmbH, founded January 27, 2021

In our research and the funding projects we have worked on in cooperation with various companies, we have focused specifically on the industrial applicability of LBM. Based on these findings and our experience in LBM, we began to develop our own innovative fluid solver. This resulted in a prototype that is now one of the fastest transient fluid solvers in the world.

This development work was made possible in part by the EXIST start-up grant that we received from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection in 2021. We used the funding phase intensively to found cloudfluid GmbH, create business plans, acquire our first customers and embed our solver in a fully automated cloud system.

As cloudfluid GmbH, we strive to break through the current hurdles and limitations of numerical simulation, in particular:

  1. that highly specialized and scarcely available personnel are required for operation, model selection, evaluation and interpretation
  2. that inflexible and expensive annual licenses are necessary, which do not scale ideally with the individual requirements of customers and
  3. that large computing capacities with high costs must be maintained for the complex calculations of CFD - this is very inefficient with only sporadic utilization.

Our vision is to make flow simulations of multiphysical phenomena with high temporal and spatial resolution accessible and affordable for every company - a democratization of CFD.

To this end, we have developed a completely new way of using flow simulations. To make this possible, we are integrating the results of cutting-edge scientific research into intuitive software products and also contributing to the expansion of the state of the art ourselves. What this technology looks like in the form of our cloudfluid solver is described under “The technology behind cloudfluid”.

cloudfluid GmbH has followed the path of organic growth from the very beginning and has not yet raised any venture capital. While other start-ups look for business angels and investors early on, we focus strongly on our customers and their challenges. Our primary goal is to grow together with our customers over the long term and to develop our product in line with customer expectations and requirements - as recommended by the lean startup concept in the broadest sense.

Our contribution to a climate-friendly future

By replacing some of the prototypes or test series that were previously required with extensive and precise CFD simulations, companies can not only save time and money, but also reduce their consumption of materials and electricity. The digital development of products significantly reduces the resources required for experiments and the development of prototypes. Not only are significantly fewer materials used to produce the prototypes, but the use of energy, water and CO2 emissions are also reduced.

In view of the major challenge of climate change, cloudfluid GmbH is also endeavoring to bring CFD simulations to companies that have previously been denied or severely limited access to this tool - and thus to digitally investigate a large number of prototypes and experiments in the future. cloudfluid also acts as a multiplier by helping our customers to develop more sustainable production and products.

In addition, the aim is to offer the simulations themselves as resource-efficiently and sustainably as possible. Thanks to our highly efficient algorithm in a highly efficient cloud, considerable amounts of electricity can be saved. This is a challenge that we are taking on, especially in light of the ever-increasing energy requirements for data centers. To achieve this, we combine state-of-the-art, highly efficient algorithms on high-performance hardware in a regeneratively operated cloud.

In a comparison of power consumption, we were able to evaluate the energy savings in the simulation with our technology. We achieved energy savings of up to 99.9% compared to a simulation with OpenFOAM on CPU cores.

The Green Startup Program of the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU), through which we were funded in 2022 and 2023, enabled us to pursue these ambitious goals in addition to the development of the powerful and convenient simulation. The success of these efforts has also been confirmed by the climate protection label awarded by the Baden-Württemberg Climate Protection Foundation.

climate label