The preCICE Newsletter (archive)

[Makis]

Earlier this year, we started a quarterly Newsletter, highlighting the most important updates in the preCICE universe, including:

• New publications
• New features
• New adapters, bindings, tools, tutorials, and more
• Upcoming events and news from the community

The newsletter issues will be short and only refer to other resources. We will continue to post announcements and longer blog posts in this News category of the forum, and we will be using this (locked) thread to archive the emails we send, so that they appear in the Search, and so that we can render them on the preCICE website.

Find the first issue (February 2026) in this thread, expect the next one in May.

If you have not yet done so, register to the preCICE newsletter. There will be no notifications in the forum for new issues.

[Makis]

Issue archive: February 2026

Welcome to the first preCICE Newsletter, a compact update on recent developments in and around the preCICE coupling library.

If this newsletter was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.

Contributions are very welcome. New adapters, papers, projects, or noteworthy results can be sent to benjamin uekermann at ipvs dot uni-stuttgart.de. The next issue will be published in May.

Today’s topics:

• WCCM 2026: abstract deadline
• preCICE Workshop 2027 in Delft
• Mesh–particle coupling
• New releases: v3.3.0 and v3.3.1
• New preprint: waveform iteration
• New preprint: data mapping for an ESM benchmark
• News from the community
• preCICE on LinkedIn

WCCM 2026: abstract deadline

The World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM 2026) will take place in Munich, Germany, on July 19–24, 2026.

We are again organizing a preCICE minisymposium: Multi-Physics and Multi-Scale Simulations With The Coupling Library preCICE (MS070)

The abstract deadline (already extended) is February 9, 2026.

Further information: ECCOMAS WCCM 2026 | preCICE - The Coupling Library

preCICE Workshop 2027 in Delft

The 7th preCICE Workshop will be held for the first time outside Germany at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, on March 1–5, 2027. It is co-organized by Matthias Möller and his team from the Numerical Analysis group and the G+Smo community.

As in previous editions, the workshop will include user and developer talks, hands-on training sessions, discussions with the developers about applications and use cases, and ample opportunities for networking. A special focus will be on coupling to solvers based on Isogeometric Analysis (IGA).

More information: preCICE workshop 2027 | preCICE - The Coupling Library

Mesh–particle coupling

Mesh–particle coupling has been a recent development focus, building on preCICE’s just-in-time data mapping capabilities.

Robin Walloner summarized his bachelor’s thesis on coupling LIGGGHTS and OpenFOAM in a blog post: Flexible mesh‑particle coupling with preCICE

In parallel, David Schneider developed a coupling with MercuryDPM in collaboration with Thomas Weinhardt (University of Twente) and Anthony Thornton (now University of Manchester):

• Development work: Bitbucket
• A first tutorial case is currently being added: Channel transport with particles by davidscn · Pull Request #700 · precice/tutorials · GitHub

A dedicated publication covering these developments is planned.

New releases: v3.3.0 and v3.3.1

With preCICE v3.3.0, the focus was on improving clarity, portability, and tooling. The release introduces clearer coupling-state output, more informative error messages, and a substantially reworked tooling ecosystem, now bundled in the new preCICE CLI. Platform support has been extended, in particular for Windows via MSYS2.

Release highlights: Highlights of the new preCICE release v3.3

Since then, the bugfix release v3.3.1 has been published: Release v3.3.1 · precice/precice · GitHub

The next feature release, v3.4.0, is planned for April. The current milestone: GitHub · Where software is built

New preprint: waveform iteration

We published a new preprint titled A waveform iteration implementation for black-box multi-rate higher-order coupling. It provides a concise summary of the dissertation of Benjamin Rodenberg.

The paper describes how waveform iteration was integrated into preCICE and how the extension interacts with existing features such as data mapping, quasi-Newton acceleration, and parallel peer-to-peer communication. Design decisions are discussed in detail. Numerical results demonstrate significant error reductions—often by orders of magnitude—for the partitioned oscillator, partitioned heat, and perpendicular flap tutorials, even for extreme time-step ratios of up to 100:1 and 1000:1.

New preprint: data mapping for an ESM benchmark

Evaluation of preCICE (version 3.3.0) in an Earth System Model Regridding Benchmark: EGUsphere - Evaluation of preCICE (version 3.3.0) in an Earth System Model Regridding Benchmark

In Earth System Modeling, meshes of different model components usually do not match, requiring robust data mapping algorithms in coupling software. Building on the benchmark introduced by Valcke et al. (2022), this study evaluates preCICE and compares its results to those of specialized ESM couplers. While preCICE does not provide ESM-specific functionality out of the box, the study shows that, with appropriate pre- and postprocessing, it achieves comparable results. In particular, the use of radial basis function mapping yields significantly lower errors.

News from the community

Recent community stories include:

• Closed-loop natural convection flow in deformed bundles, Matilde Fiore, Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Belgium
• Turbulent flow coupling for flow-induced vibrations, Enrico Pivato, Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Belgium
• Fluid–structure–electricity coupling for flexible wave energy converters, Qing Xiao, University of Strathclyde, UK

New project:

• ERC Synergy Grant on Greenland’s ice sheet, involving a team including Angelika Humbert (AWI)

preCICE on LinkedIn

preCICE is now present as a company on LinkedIn: preCICE | LinkedIn
Following the page is an easy way to stay informed about news and to share or tag projects that use preCICE.

[Makis]

Issue archive: June 2026

Welcome to the preCICE Newsletter, a compact update on recent developments in and around the preCICE coupling library. This is issue 2, from June 2026.

If this newsletter was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.

Contributions are very welcome. New adapters, papers, projects, or noteworthy results can be sent to benjamin.uekermann@ipvs.uni-stuttgart.de.
The next issue will be published in September.

Today’s topics:

• Online training targeting the Americas
• WCCM program announced
• New releases: v3.4.0 and v3.4.1
• Call for use cases: FlexMap2 proposal
• Participation in Google Summer of Code
• MESHFREE coupled to preCICE
• More news from the community

Online training targeting the Americas

In October 5-9, 2026, we are organizing the first online preCICE training, mainly targeting participants in the US, Canada, and Latin America (time: 12–3 pm EDT (UTC-4)) that cannot easily travel to the preCICE Workshop – with the next workshop being in March 2027. Over the span of one week, the training will include elements of the longer training course of the preCICE Workshop, invited talks, and news from the preCICE developers. Registration will open soon.

WCCM program announced

The WCCM 2026 in Munich is approaching: July, 19-25, 2026. The minisymposium Multi-Physics and Multi-Scale Simulations With The Coupling Library preCICE will presumably take place on Thursday. The official program announcement should be available any day now. Are you also presenting anything related to preCICE, but not in the preCICE minisymposium? Please let us know when and where, for example, in the preCICE forum, and we will advertise on the preCICE website and will try to join your presentation.

New releases: v3.4.0 and v3.4.1

With preCICE v3.4, we pushed features on several fronts. We made quasi-Newton acceleration bounds-aware as a first step toward fully supporting bounded coupling variables, such as density or volume ratio. Partition-of-unity RBF data mapping can now exploit accelerators, and the geometric multi-scale data mapping supports more variants. Read the full blog post

Call for use cases: FlexMap2 proposal

We started working on a follow-up proposal of FlexMap. In the previous project, which is about to end, we made substantial progress in making data mapping more flexible and more efficient: partition-of-unity RBF mapping, GPU support, direct mesh access, and just-in-time mapping. The follow-up project will now focus on closing application gaps: boundary and mask-aware data mapping (e.g., discontinuous data), conservative data mapping, and mapping between highly heterogenous meshes. If you have any input, feature requests, or use cases, please let Benjamin know.

Participation in Google Summer of Code

For the first time this year, we applied and got accepted to the Google Summer of Code program, and we will be mentoring two projects! Over the next three months, we will be intensively working with our mentees on modernizing the preCICE website (@MuhammadAashirAslam) and on improving our system tests infrastructure (@PranjalManhgaye), onboarding them to the preCICE and the wider open-source community. During the intense application period, 70 people introduced themselves in the forum and we received more than 200 pull requests on the website, core library, tutorials, micro-manager, and further repositories. Many of these contributions have been very helpful; some long-standing bugs have been fixed since day 1 of the first GSoC announcement, and we wish we had resources to mentor more people, even for similar projects. Through this coming-of-age experience, we have already learned a lot, and we are taking measures to be able to more effectively welcome and manage community contributions. Stay tuned for more updates from these projects in the next issue.

MESHFREE coupled to preCICE

Fraunhofer ITWM recently integrated a preCICE adapter into their powerful MESHFREE solver. The adapter supports both coupling of MESHFREE to each other (water-air coupling) and coupling of MESHFREE to external structural mechanics codes for fluid-structure interaction. The coupling of MESHFREE to itself benefits from the adaptibility preCICE brings by enabling independent domain decompositions and non-matching time-step sizes. Beta release notes, docs, contact: Chaitanya Sanghavi

More news from the community

In the last months, we saw a few interesting publications from the community (non-complete list):

• Mario Ponce Tovar (PSI Center for Nuclear Engineering and Sciences) et al. compared external to internal coupling for the simulation of microreactors, acknowledging the large potential that code-agnostic coupling to could bring to the field.
• Jingya Li (TU Delft) et al. presented a new IGA-based approach for large deformations in ALE-based fluid-structure interaction (preprint), which can also be used in external CFD solvers via preCICE.
• Daniel Abele (DLR and AWI) et al. evaluated preCICE in coupled ice-sheet-subglacial-hydrology simulations (accepted preprint), identifying necessary future extensions to make preCICE fully applicable in Earth System Modeling.

A new recent community story:

• preCICE Coupling for the Final Phase Simulator, ArianeGroup