Using Fastflo to model the kinetic energy distribution near the floor, and velocity around a car's surface.

Using Fastflo to model the kinetic energy distribution near the floor, and velocity around a car's surface.

Fastflo: fast, flexible software for mathematicians, scientists and engineers

Our Fastflo software has many applications such as modelling air turbulence, understanding cooling processes or simulating pressure changes.

  • 25 November 2010 | Updated 11 April 2013
  1. Fastflo overview
  2. Technical information
  3. Strengths and applications
  4. Application - turbulent flow over a car
  5. Application - heart valve
  6. Download Fastflo demo

Fastflo overview

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What is Fastflo?

Fastflo is a finite element package developed by CSIRO for the numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) in one-, two- and three-dimensional regions.

PDEs can be used to describe and model a wide range of phenomena such as fluid flow, financial processes, solid mechanics and many more.  Fastflo allows modelling of these diverse systems by specifying and solving the PDEs that govern them.

What are its advantages?

Fastflo’s main advantage as a general PDE solver is its flexibility in specifying models in two and three dimensions, and algorithms to solve them. 

Fastflo’s main advantage as a general PDE solver is its flexibility.

The PDEs can be:

  • well known (such as fluid flow, linear elasticity, heat conduction, electromagnetism and eigenvalue problems)
  • non-standard equations encountered in scientific or industrial applications

PDEs are solved using an algorithm specifically designed by the user.

Fastflo's uses

Fastflo is ideal in many settings, including:

  • research laboratories where engineers, scientists or mathematicians need an everyday PDE solver
  • universities, for research by graduate students and faculty
  • as a teaching aid in advanced undergraduate classes on PDEs and their numerical solution.

Fastflo is presented as a graphical user interface but can also be viewed as a finite element environment.

Finite element operations such as assembly and solving can be invoked by simple commands.

Fastflo in Fasttalk

In Fastflo, PDE problems are written in Fasttalk, a high-level language allowing problem descriptions that:

  • are concise and mathematically intuitive
  • have ample levels of detail
  • are less time-consuming to write than languages like FORTRAN or C
  • are, along with the algorithm to solve the problem, stored in freely available files.

Learn more about our work in Computational Fluid Dynamics.