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CD-adapco is a multinational computer software company that authors and distributes applications used for computer-aided engineering, best known for its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) products.

In their 2009 annual user conference, CD-adapco announced that the company had grown 22% in 2008, and they expected similar results in 2009. Professional Engineering Magazine described this as "recession-proof performance" and went on to point out that this success is especially notworthy considering that many of the company's customers are in the automotive industry, a sector of the economy that was, at the time, suffering record low sales levels. During the financial downturn of 2009, CD-adapco launched their "No Engineer Left Behind" program, which provided free Star-CCM+ licenses and training for displaced and unemployed engineers.

Products
thumb|left|A screenshot of a fluid-flow analysis being conducted in Star-CCM+

Star-CD
CD-adapco's legacy CFD package, Star-CD, was praised by Renault automotive design engineers as a "world class design package". Nearly 75% of the points won during the 2005 Formula 1 season were awarded to drivers of cars that were designed with Star-CD.

Star-CCM+
In 2004, CD-adapco opted to shift their attention from improving Star-CD to completely rewriting their computational fluid dynamics (CFD) algorithms and tools. The company gampled that in the end, starting from a "blank slate" with a group of experts would produce a better result than continuing to work improvements into their old products In early 2004, the company introduced this new product, Star-CCM+, the "CCM" standing for "computational continuum mechanics". The application employs a client-server architecture, to allow users to solve problems from a lightweight computer, such as a laptop, while the computationally-expensive math is done on a remote machine. This substantially reduces the need for expensive desktop computers -- a requirement of some other similar packages

Even in periods of major economic downturn, few customers cut back on annual licenses. CD-adapco has speculated that their product's success has been partially due to the fact that their application was designed from the start to simultaneously solve fluid flow and heat transfer problems. Competing products are often a separate solvers coupled together, and conducting an analysis that involves both requires that both be kept in agreement; a time consuming complication that degrades accuracy.

Fuel Cells
In a partnership with the United States Department of Energy, CD-adapco developed an expert system to model and analyze solid oxide fuel cells

Technology
thumb|right|A simple valve discretized into [[Finite Element Analysis|finite elements using CD-adapco's polyhedral mesher]]

Finite Element Meshing
The first "official release" of Star-CCM+ included the world's first commercially available polyhedral meshing algorithm. . The use of a polyhedral mesh has proven to be more accurate for fluid-flow problems than a hexahedral or tetrahedral mesh of a similar size (number of cells). , but is considerably more difficult to create.