Paris - France and Lausanne - Switzerland, November 18, 2005 - ESI Group's (ISIN FR0004110310), metallurgical development team has been selected for its proven ability to develop and implement accurate material models  to simulate complex solidification and solid state transformation phenomena.

ISA-PESR, started in September 2004 with a duration of three years. This is an innovative project dedicated to the simulation of advanced protective gas electro-slag-remelting for the production of high quality steels. It is financed by a research program from the European Commission Research Fund for Coal and Steel. ESI Group, France participates in the program developing specific solvers enabling the modeling of complex electromagnetic interactions during the casting process. A commercial module tailored to the needs of the remelting industry will be developed and coupled with the casting simulation software available from ESI Group.

The project is coordinated by the Montan University of Leoben in Austria with the participation of prestigious partners such as ALD Vacuum Technologies in Germany, Böhler Edelstahl GmbH in Austria and Centro Sviluppo Materiali in Italy.

The second program is IMPRESS which started in November 2004 for a duration of five years. This project is part of the 6^th Framework Program of the European Commission coordinated by the European Space Agency. Calcom ESI, ESI Group’s Swiss subsidiary, is directly funded by the Swiss Secretariat for Education and Research. The goal of the project, in which 41 European institutes and companies are participating, is to understand the critical link between material processing, material structure and material properties of novel higher-performance multi-functional intermetallic alloys and to transfer this new knowledge into breakthrough prototypes tailored for extreme applications such as turbine blades and fuel cells.

Calcom ESI will contribute to this ambitious project by concentrating its efforts on coupled casting and heat treatment simulation, prediction of material properties altered by porosity and assessment of the solid state transformation during heat treatment. For this study, a close collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has already been initiated.

“These close collaborations with visionary companies and leading Universities and Research Institutes enable ESI Group to further develop its casting solutions and thereby to continuously provide industries worldwide with improved, reliable and sophisticated software products.” says Marco Gremaud, Business Development Director, Casting Solutions, ESI Group.

ESI Group’s Casting Solution

Casting process simulation is now widely accepted as an important tool in product design and process development to improve casting yield and quality. ESI Group’s casting portfolio includes ProCAST, the market leading finite element solution for casting process simulation, CALCOSOFT, for fast and efficient modeling of continuous casting processes and PAM-QUIKCAST, the finite difference solution for casting process evaluation.

About ESI Group

ESI Group is a world-leading supplier, and a pioneer of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes that take into account the physics of materials. ESI Group has developed an extensive suite of coherent, industry oriented applications to realistically simulate a product’s behaviour during testing, to fine-tune manufacturing processes in accordance with desired product performance, and evaluate the environment’s impact on product performance. ESI Group’s products, which have a proven track record in manufacturing and have been combined in multi-trade value chains, represent a unique collaborative and open virtual engineering solution known as the Virtual Try-Out Space (VTOS), enabling virtual prototypes to be improved in a continuous and collaborative manner. This integrated protocol allows all the company’s solutions to work with each other and with applications developed by independent software vendors. By significantly reducing costs and development lead times and enabling product/process synergies, VTOS solutions offer major competitive advantage by progressively eliminating the need for physical prototypes during product development. The company generated sales of circa €60m in 2004, employs almost 500 high-level specialists worldwide covering more than 30 countries. ESI Group is listed in Eurolist compartment C of Euronext Paris. For further information, visit www.esi-group.com.

ESI GROUP has been qualified as “an innovative company” since January 20 2000 by the ANVAR and is eligible for inclusion in “FCPI” (venture capital trusts dedicated to innovation).

Virtual Try-Out Space® and VTOS® are registered trademarks of ESI Group. All other products, names or companies are the brands or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

ESI Group - Press Relations
Nathalie David-Franc
nathalie.david-franc@esi-group.com
Phone: + 33 (0)1 41 73 58 35