History of the FPM

Frank Stratmann has been doing Aerosol research since the mid-80's at the University of Duisburg. Together with Chimera Technolgies' Evan Whitby, he did pioneering work in the development of an Eulerian model for particle size distribution dynamics in fluid flows based on an the Modal Aerosol Modeling technique and Innovatve Research's COMPACT fluid flow model (which was called SIMPLER in those days). In 1992, Frank joined the newly founded Institute for Tropospheric Research (IfT) in Leipzig as an expert for aerosol dynamics modeling.

Martin Wilck started working for Frank as a PhD student in late 1994, extending and improving Frank's model. His Ph.D. thesis examined the possibilites to model systems of multicomponent particles in the framework of the Modal Aerosol Modeling technique and developed the MADMAcS family of aerosol dynamics models.

After finishing his thesis in 1998, Martin stayed another 3 years at the IfT, still working mostly on improvements of modeling techniques.

Eventually, in 1999, Evan brought up the idea of turning our common know-how into a commercial product. Evan hat a consulting project with a client using FLUENT for the flow modelling at that time, and needed an aerosol module to plug into FLUENT. Frank, Martin, and Evan decided to write a new model from scratch based on the experience with MADMAcS. In order to work with FLUENT; the model had to be written in C (as opposed to MADMAcS, which is in written in FORTRAN), thus a major rework was necessary anyway. Besides, the rewrite offered the opportunity to avoid some design errors that had limited the flexibility of MADMAcS.

From there the FPM evolved into what it is today, the first commercially available model for particle size distributions.

In 2001, Martin and Frank founded the "Aerosol Dynamics Modeling and Consulting GbR Stratmann und Wilck, Leipzig". This company started developing and marketing the FPM together with Chimera Technologies.

In 2003, particle dynamics GmbH was founded by Frank and Martin to lay more solid grounds for the FPM business. Subsequently, particle dynamics took over the FPM business from ADMC.