The Texas office of Altair Engineering, located in Austin, TX, focuses its activities on Research and Software Development for engineering applications.

Historically, this unit originates from the Computational Mechanics Company, Inc. (COMCO), which was founded in 1982 by Dr. J. Tinsley Oden to perform research and software development in Computational and Applied Mechanics. In fulfilling that mission, COMCO has won 20 highly competitive SBIR awards, including 7 Phase II contracts, more, we believe, than any other organization in our field. In addition, COMCO has earned a number of direct contracts from various government agencies, including DoD, NASA, AFOSR, DoE, DoI and NSF.

While performing advanced research in various areas of Applied Mechanics, COMCO emerged as a pioneer and leader in the development of error estimators and adaptive computational methods, in particular solution-adaptive finite element techniques. The applications of these techniques spanned various areas of mechanics, including Computational Fluid Dynamics, Hypersonic Flow-Thermal-Structural Interactions, Chemically Reacting Flows, Advanced Models of Contact and Friction, Tire Modeling, Damage and Crack Propagation, Artificial Intelligence, Oil Reservoir Simulation, Modeling of Store Separation, Non-Newtonian Flow, Flutter and Buffeting, Squeak Prediction, and Earthquake Source Modeling.

Building on the technological advances made during its early years, COMCO began in 1989 to develop a generic computational kernel which could be applied to a broad range of engineering problems. The first release of this PHLEX kernel was substantially complete in early 1991. During the ensuing years, the kernel evolved into a specialized product ProPHLEX. ProPHLEX is a generic finite element library supporting development of various applications for the simulation of a broad spectrum of physical phenomena, which may be described as linear or nonlinear second order boundary-value problems. Importantly, ProPHLEX accomplishes this in the context of error estimation and hp-adaptive finite element techniques, which simultaneously adjust both the finite element size and its order of approximation to achieve high-accuracy results at minimum computational cost.

Based on the PHLEX kernel, COMCO has developed several engineering software products, as well as specialized codes for specific application areas, such as nonlinear structural mechanics, flow-structure interaction, store separation modeling, crack propagation, friction modeling, and others.

In recent years, the focus of the company shifted to include more engineering applications, and COMCO has established special technological relationships with industrial partners, including Goodyear, Texaco, Ford, and others. Each arrangement is unique to the client's industry and internal circumstances, but all are based on the concept of COMCO as a provider of technology for engineering simulation.

In May of 1996, COMCO became a subsidiary of Altair Computing ( presently Altair Engineering), whose main offices are located in Troy, Michigan.  Then, in January 2000, it was fully incorporated into Altair Engineering as a unit dedicated to Research and Development. Our present interests and activities focus on software development, advanced research, and engineering services.