Design Wtwcre One of the objectives of the Small Business Administration's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program is to encourage contractors to pursue research on innovative concepts and to seek I commercialization of the end product. Spinof An example of a company that has I soware successfully attained that end is ViGYAN Inc., p d u c ~ Harnpton, Virginia. ViGYAN is a small have found minority business f m providing aerospace, application environmental and data processing services. in auto Founded in 1979, the company received its design, first contract from NASA's Langley structural Research Center. Langley subsequently analysis and sponsored SBIR awards to ViGYAN for research other non- and development of advanced software for e r n e computer simulation of flight vehicle c~~gurations. as VGRID3D and VPLOT3D. Both are employed in ViGYAN has converted the results of its NASA the aerospace design technique called computational applications research into commercial software products known fluid dynamics (CFD) and they have also found application in automobile design, structural analysis and other non-aerospace applications. In aeronautical research, design engineers create mathematical models of flight vehicles and "fly" them by computer simulation. One of the disciplines extensively used is CFD, wherein the flow over a complex three-dimensional ~o~guratiois n simulated using mathematical equations. The body of the c~~guratioannd the space surrounding it is represented by clusters of points, lines and surfaces; equations are numerically solved at these points. The set of lines and surfaces is called a adaptive refinement and moving boundaries and offer better control over the grid size and point clustering. It is in these areas that ViGYAN has been working for NASA and the company has created - with VGIUD3D and VPLOT3D - what company officials term "an easier Availability of alternative to the use of conventional structured =percorrzpu~ grids for fluid dynamic calculations." has made it VGFUD3D is a robust, interactive possible to program for generation of unstructured grids calculatef low around complex 3D configurations. Examples fw& around of the types of grids it produces are shown at vezy complex left (a SAAB auto) and left center (a Space shapes in a Shuttle study). VPLOT3D is an interactive, menu matter of driven post-processing graphics program for hours manipulation and computational grid; the accuracy of the final result display of fluid dynamic data on unstructured grids. depends in great measure on the quality of the grid. VPLOT3D examples are pictured in the top photo Since the early days of CFD, scientists have used (which shows Mach number contours on an F-18 "structured" grids - a structured set of lines in three military aircraft) and above (a composite picture of a coordinate directions. In recent years, availability of generic aircraft design). supercomputers has made it possible to calculate flow fields around very complex shapes in a matter of hours. However, grid generation, using the structured grid method, still takes a large part of the typical computational cycle. An alternative grid generation technique - "unstructured" grids - has received a lot of research attention in recent years. In addition to an inherent ability to handle complex ~o~iguratiownsit h ease, unstructured grids are apt to efficiently incorporate