Innovation corner

We’re excited to introduce PreonLab 7.2! Where previous releases focused on adding new physics capabilities, PreonLab 7.2 is about getting the most out of them. This release brings a broad set of improvements to everyday workflows, making work in PreonLab faster, more intuitive, and unlocking more value from both existing and new features. At the same time, 7.2 makes steady-state thermal simulations considerably more efficient and brings targeted improvements for transmission, soiling, and rigid body simulation workflows. Together, these enhancements let you spend less time on simulation setup and focus more time on understanding the results. Setup Profiles and Script Recording: PreonLab 7.2 introduces two new features that make simulation setup faster and more consistent. Setup Profiles store and apply predefined settings for recurring simulation types, giving users a reliable starting point. Proven settings and best practices can be captured once in a profile and applied to every new scene. This is especially valuable when the same type of simulation is run across many projects or design variants. Script Recording complements this by capturing actions performed in the GUI and automatically generating the corresponding PreonPy code. This gives users a ready-made starting point for their own scripts and makes automation easier to get started with. Script Recording and Setup Profiles are complemented by a wide range of smaller enhancements to simulation setup, scene navigation, visualization, keyframing and post-processing. Many of these came directly from your feedback. Staggered CHT for Thermal Simulations: PreonLab 7.2 introduces Staggered CHT, which reduces the time needed to reach a converged thermal state by up to 8x compared to the Monolithic CHT approach. Instead of computing fluid and solid together at every time step, the two domains are alternately active and frozen. The active domain sees the frozen one similar to a boundary condition. This takes advantage of their very different time scales. The fluid flow reaches a steady state much faster than the solids, which, due to their low thermal diffusivity, take far longer to reach a converged thermal state. The result is a substantial speed-up with comparable accuracy for the steady-state result, making applications such as e-motor cooling significantly more efficient to simulate. Transmission, Soiling and Other Improvements: PreonLab 7.2 makes transmission simulations easier to set up. The new setup profiles make it possible to store and apply predefined settings for single phase and multiphase cases, and improvements to calculated properties, which now also support keyframing of the input properties, reduce the number of manual steps required before simulating. For challenging multiphase cases with continuous particle size (CPS), the new Compressible Position Correction (CPC) option enables a more stable and robust simulation, and based on our tests, makes such cases more tractable. The Virtual Wind Tunnel now automatically keyframes wheel rotation based on the airflow, simplifying the workflow for soiling applications. For rain management, the rain source goes beyond the normal distribution of earlier versions: users can now define their own drop size distribution to match measured rain conditions more closely. Furthermore, we are thrilled to introduce exciting advancements for rigid body simulation in PreonLab – in the form of rigid body constraints and joints. This experimental new feature adds to the possibility of applying external loads to dynamic rigid bodies and lets users model connected mechanisms such as hinged flaps and linked components, opening the door to new applications in PreonLab. Read on further for all the details! Make sure to follow us on LinkedIn so that you don’t miss new videos, case studies and updates!

PreonLab 7.2 is all about getting more out of every simulation, with faster setups, more efficient thermal workflows, and a smoother everyday user experience. Highlights of this release include Setup Profiles, which store predefined simulation settings and share them across teams, and Script Recording, which turns GUI actions into reusable PreonPy code. On the thermal side, Staggered CHT makes steady-state thermal simulations up to 8x faster. The release also brings a wide range of workflow enhancements, many of them requested directly by our users, as well as targeted improvements for transmission, soiling, and rigid body simulations. The result is less time spent on setup and more time for engineering and understanding results. Join our release event to see the new features live and discover how they can speed up your daily simulation work!

Since the 1.0 release, we have been busy making your everyday workflow faster and smoother, are excited to announce the next stage. Version 1.1 is a focused update built around the things you do most: launching simulations, finding your data, and understanding your results.  Here is what stands out. 

It’s time for our PreonDay again! On September 17, 2026, FIFTY2 Technology GmbH and AVL Deutschland GmbH invite you to the Audi driving experience center in Neuburg an der Donau for an inspiring day dedicated to PreonLab. Discover the latest developments in our simulation software PreonLab and learn how it helps address current challenges in the simulation of modern technologies!

We’re excited to introduce PreonLab 7.1. This release brings important new capabilities, but also further advances and builds upon capabilities from previous releases. PreonLab 7.1 introduces new capabilities for airflow generation to couple with soiling simulations, while extending our vehicle dynamics functionality even further. It also advances thermal simulation, making our solver both faster and more accurate. At the same time, it delivers a new set of workflow and usability improvements shaped directly by you, our customers. Together, these enhancements span physics modeling, software efficiency, and day-to-day workflows, making our end-to-end solution faster, more accurate, and more user-friendly. Virtual Wind Tunnel: Version 7.1 introduces an exciting new possibility for users to generate airflows within PreonLab and shorten feedback loops for soiling simulations early in the design phase. The Virtual Wind Tunnel is a new feature in PreonLab that uses an FVM-solver to simulate steady and transient airflow. While applicable to any geometry, it is optimized for vehicle applications. The generated airflow can be directly combined with hydrodynamics via one-way coupling in soiling simulations. With the new Virtual Wind Tunnel, we further enhance the usability of PreonLab and give Preoneers greater control over their simulation workflows by reducing external dependencies. Higher-order Thermal Solver Upgrades: The higher-order thermal solver introduced in the previous release has been further improved to deliver both better performance and higher accuracy. These improvements are visible across thermal benchmarks, showing that the solver is not only stronger in individual use cases but also more robust and consistent overall. These improvements make conjugate heat transfer (CHT) simulation increasingly more feasible within a single simulation tool. The new PreonLab version also benefits external coupling workflows by increasing stability and accuracy. Improved workflows and user experience: The latest release introduces a broad range of workflow and usability improvements shaped directly by customer feedback. More than many previous releases, 7.1 places a strong focus on making every day work in PreonLab smoother, faster, and more intuitive. Many of these additions come from requests by experienced users who know the software well and understand where small improvements can have a big impact. This release includes features such as simulation stopping criteria, calculated properties, sensor data export in EnSight Gold format, scene access and concurrency control indicators. Taken together, these improvements significantly enhance the day-to-day user and continuously translating that feedback into meaningful, practical improvements. Other Notable Additions: PreonLab 7.1 includes improvements to stability of simulations involving the Full Car Suspension Model (FCSM) and enhances how vehicles can move through curved trajectories based on Ackermann kinematics. Smart new updates make vehicle paths velocity-independent, vehicle steering more realistic, and simulation setup more predictable. Additionally, it is now possible to apply external forces and torques to dynamic rigids for more realistic simulation in PreonLab. Read on further for all the details! Make sure to follow us on LinkedIn so that you don’t miss new videos, case studies and updates!

Building on the major advances introduced in recent releases, PreonLab 7.1 marks the next step in making particle-based simulation more powerful, practical, and user-friendly. This release introduces exciting new capabilities for airflow generation to support soiling simulations, extends vehicle dynamics functionality, and further advances thermal simulation with meaningful improvements in both performance and accuracy. At the same time, PreonLab 7.1 delivers a broad range of workflow and usability enhancements shaped directly by customer feedback. Together, these updates strengthen physics modeling, improve software efficiency, and make everyday simulation work smoother and more intuitive. Join our Release Event to explore the new capabilities in action and see how they can improve your simulation workflows!

To design efficient maritime and offshore structures, a good understanding of the dynamic response to hydrodynamic loads is key. To make better design choices, hydrodynamicists historically relied on model-scale experiments. A specialized laboratory facility called a wave flume, wave basin or wave tank is used to study the behavior of water waves and their interaction with structures or sediments. Due to the limited dimensions of wave tanks, experiments are often performed with scaled down models, leading to unwanted scaling effects. E.g., it is in practice very difficult to have parity in Froude and Reynolds numbers between model and full scale, which leads to over or underestimation of hydrodynamic forces. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), on the other hand, allows researchers to do full scale experiments using a numerical representation of a wave tank. In this article we will demonstrate how to simulate a numerical wave tank using PreonLab’s mesh-free approach, and convenient built-in features to model free-surface flows and rigid-body kinematics.

Centralize & Accelerate Your PreonLab Workflow – Meet PreonDock 1.0 As the volume and complexity of simulation data grow, it becomes a major challenge to keep everything organized, accessible, and actionable. That’s where PreonDock steps in! Your centralized, browser-based platform to manage, monitor, and compare simulation is officially available now. Access your PreonLab projects and simulations potentially from anywhere, in an intuitive web interface, using PreonDock.

We’re pleased to announce the release of PreonLab 7.0. This update marks a significant step forward, expanding capabilities across key areas like thermal analysis, vehicle dynamics, transmissions, multiphase flows, visualization, and overall usability. Several of these features have been in development for quite a long time, resulting in substantial improvements that enhance accuracy, efficiency, and integration into our long-term vision of developing the ultimate simulation tool. We look forward to seeing how they support your work. Read on for a breakdown of the highlights. Higher-order Thermal Solver: The higher-order solver unites the strengths of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and the Moving Least Squares method, delivering high-accuracy results near boundaries. While our previous solver provided a solid foundation, it sometimes lacked accuracy in boundary regions critical for thermal applications. The higher-order thermal solver introduces a method that delivers precise, boundary-accurate results, directly addressing long-standing feedback from users.  This enhances our thermal capabilities to meet industry-standard requirements, marking a pivotal milestone toward the market-leading particle-based solver for thermal applications. Extensions to the Full Car Suspension Model (FCSM): PreonLab 7.0 also brings powerful enhancements to the FCSM framework. These upgrades ensure better wheel-ground interactions and provide improved stability under extreme conditions. It will be possible to perform simulations that include wheel detachment from the road, unlocking simulations for amphibious vehicles and emergency sinking scenarios. Additionally, vehicle motion now accounts for road slope, fluid interaction, and traction loss, enabling realistic responses to external forces. New distance-based mapping allows velocity profiles to follow the vehicle’s traveled path instead of time. New response limits constrain acceleration to physically plausible bounds, while a PID-based driver model adds configurable gains and reaction time for realistic driver behavior. Enhancements for Transmission Applications: In the context of transmission applications, this latest release introduces smart new features that aim to enhance numerical stability and phase distribution for some of the more challenging simulation cases. These include: Particle Shifting, an advanced new algorithm that reduces numerical noise by moving particles to a better integration position along their physical trajectory. Wall Confinement Handling, for improved handling of particles that can get trapped between two solid surfaces like in the meshing area between the teeth of two gears. We have also observed so far, that these features can help to minimize particle leakage issues, which can sometimes occur in very challenging simulation cases. Finally, a new maximum velocity constraint, that allows the user to manage maximum velocity outliers in the simulation, to improve overall simulation stability as well as the phase distribution via better handling of the air velocity field. Other Notable Additions: The on-going expansion of the entire feature set to our Particle Engine platform sees further benefits for performance and memory-optimization for MPI and multi-GPU simulation. Additional highlights include the exciting possibility to simulate snow in combination with fluids and elastic materials in a single setup, upgrades to Calculation Objects, and enhanced usability features such as 3D mouse support, to give users more flexibility and control during simulation set up and analysis. To top it off, a new experimental pressure boundary condition unlocks additional simulation possibilities by allowing users to specify known pressures at inlets or outlets. Of course, that is not all. Be sure to check out the changelog for a comprehensive list of all the updates and new features that make 7.0 a major milestone in the development of PreonLab! Make sure to follow us on LinkedIn so that you don’t miss new videos, case studies and updates!

Building on a series of releases that accelerated PreonLab’s performance through GPU and multi-GPU advancements and introduced a range of multi-physics features, it’s time for another major leap forward with PreonLab 7.0! This release expands capabilities across key areas such as thermal analysis, vehicle dynamics, transmissions, and multiphase flows, alongside meaningful improvements in visualization and overall usability. Leveraging the performance gains and new possibilities of recent versions, PreonLab 7.0 empowers users to tackle more complex and demanding simulations than ever before. Many of these innovations have been in development for quite some time, culminating in substantial advances in reliability, efficiency, and usability, all aligned with our long-term vision of creating the ultimate simulation tool. Join our Release Event to discover all the details!