Draft. This manual is new and still growing. If something here does not match what you see in the software, the software is right — tell us and we will fix the page.
SHD Sim documentation
Everything about running SHD Sim — from installing it to reading a result you can defend.
New here
Start with Your first simulation. It opens the bundled hull example, meshes it, runs it and produces a report, with nothing to import and nothing to draw.
Before that you will want Installation, and it is worth knowing what the free tier covers before you plan a case around it.
Find your way
| Tutorials | Complete worked cases, start to finish. Follow one exactly and you will have a result at the end |
| How-to guides | One task at a time — add boundary layers, run in parallel, reduce a case to 2-D |
| Reference | Boundary conditions, analysis types and solvers, the command line, and a page for every panel in the application, generated from it |
| Concepts | Why y+ matters, what a turbulence model is choosing between, when a result is a result |
| Validation | Moved out of the manual on 2026-08-26. Every benchmark, with the numbers and the references, now lives at shd-sim.com/validation and nowhere else — two copies of the same measurement drifted apart once, and the reader had no way to tell which was current |
| Troubleshooting | Indexed by the error message on your screen |
The split between tutorials and how-to guides is deliberate. A tutorial makes every decision for you and is meant to be followed exactly; a how-to assumes you know what you want and gives you the steps. If you are learning, start with a tutorial. If you are stuck on one thing, the how-to is shorter.
Ideas worth having early
A case is one body and any number of studies of it. The geometry belongs to the case; the mesh, the physics and the run belong to a simulation inside it. That is what lets you compare two meshes, or two turbulence models, on the same body without copying anything — and it is what the Comparison node exists for. That node appears at case level once the case holds two simulations; the Study node beside it is there from the start, and generates the simulations for you — a sweep, a factorial design, one factor at a time, a Latin hypercube or a Sobol sensitivity.
It is not only CFD. Fluids is the deepest module and most of this manual is about it, but the application also ships structural, thermal, electromagnetics, acoustics, explicit dynamics and shape optimisation, each with its own setup tree. Settings → Integrations lists all seven and says which of them this machine has the solvers for.
A fluids case is an ordinary OpenFOAM case. Nothing is hidden or proprietary. If you know OpenFOAM you can read every file it produces; if you do not, you never have to. Case directory layout shows exactly what lands on disk so you can check that rather than take it on trust.
On accuracy
No CFD result is evidence until it has been checked against something you trust. Verification and validation sets out what this software checks for you, what it does not, and which half of that work stays yours. It is the page to read before you put a number in a report.
If something is wrong
If a page does not match what the software does, the software is right — tell us at support@shd-sim.com and we will fix the page.
Questions the manual does not answer go to the same address.