The Flomerics Group has reached agreement on the proposed acquisition of the entire share capital of NIKA GmbH (www.nika.biz), the Engineering Fluid Dynamics software company based in Frankfurt. NIKA specializes in simulation tools for the prediction of fluid flow and heat transfer.
NIKA’s computational fluid dynamics technology is derived from €8.5 million of product development investment, primarily in Russia. NIKA’s technology enhances Flomerics’ existing product range and gives access to a much wider potential customer base of design engineers outside Flomerics’ existing core market. There is a significant opportunity to expand NIKA’s sales immediately into countries such as the USA and the UK where Flomerics already has a strong presence.
NIKA’s “EFD” product is a suite of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software simulation programs used as part of the design process for a wide variety of products including vehicles, home appliances and electronic equipment.
EFD stands for “Engineering Fluid Dynamics”, which encapsulates NIKA’s unique approach to embedding CFD technology deeply into mainstream mechanical computer aided design (MCAD) software, to a level unrivalled by other CFD software vendors. NIKA uses application programming interfaces (APIs) from SolidWorks, Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, and CATIA V5 to create a familiar user interface for users of each of these MCAD tools.
Even more important is that the EFD solver interacts directly with the “native” MCAD data to create the analysis model, rather than the easier and more common approach of extracting data by file transfer and conversion. NIKA’s approach ensures that the thermal/fluid analysis is fully embedded in the central mechanical design flow, with no possibility of inconsistencies developing between CAD and “analysis” versions of the product.
