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.
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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: