Hanley Innovations

Aerodynamics & CFD Software for Education and Industry

Hanley Innovations builds accurate, easy-to-use 3D aerodynamics and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) apps that run natively on Windows PCs. Engineers, educators, and entrepreneurs use our software to design and analyze aircraft and UAVs, multi-element wings, race cars, sailboats, hydrofoils, propellers, wind-turbine and other aerodynamic components using their laptops and workstations.

Our focus is practical CFD that helps you move from idea to result quickly, so you can make confident design decisions and ship better products.

Founder

Dr. Patrick Hanley, Aerodynamicist and CFD Engineer Patrick Hanley, Ph.D.

Patrick Hanley, Ph.D., is an aerodynamicist and CFD algorithm development engineer. He is the founder of Hanley Innovations. His recent industry experience includes Principal Engineer at Shield AI, Lead CFD Engineer at Supernal (a Hyundai company) and Senior Technical Fellow at Terrafugia (the flying car company). He worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Connecticut where he was the main faculty advisor to 4 successful Ph.D. candidates and 4 MS candidates. Dr. Hanley earned his B.S. degree (summa cum laude) in Aerospace Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of New York. He earned his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT AeroAstro, with a minor in Management of Innovation and Technology from MIT Sloan.

Relevant Publications:

A Strategy for the Efficient Simulation of Viscous Compressible Flows Using a Multi-domain Pseudospectral Method, P Hanley, Journal of Computational Physics 108 (1), 153-158

Pseudospectral Simulation of 2-Dimensional Viscous Compressible Flows, P Hanley, ASME-PUBLICATIONS-FED 196, Conference paper

Additional CFD Skills:

Fidelity Pointwise, NASA FUN3D, Simcenter Star-CCM+, Flexcompute FLOW360, Stanford SU2, Paraview, TecPlot, SOLIDWORKS, NASA OpenVSP.

Recent Activities

"Exclusive Interview | Dr. Patrick Hanley, Founder of Hanley Innovations, on the Future of CFD, AI, and Aerodynamics", by Sachin R Nalawade, Daily CADCAM, July 16, 2026

"Meet Patrick Hanley, the Aerodynamicist Who Writes His Own Code", by Roopinder Tara, ENGtechnica, June 15, 2026

Speaker at MIT AeroAstro, Certificate in Aerospace Innovation, MIT, Cambridge MA, April 6, 2023

“Flying Cars”, Talking CFD Podcast, December 3, 2019

“Recasting CFD for CAD Users”, Digital Engineering Live Roundtable, June 21, 2018

“Hanley Innovations Launches Stallion with HIST Version 5.0”, Digital Engineering News, July 26, 2017

“Stallion 3D with HIST Results”, 6th AIAA CFD Drag Prediction Workshop, June 16–17, 2016

“Talking CFD Roundtable (Video)”, Talking CFD Live, May 13, 2016

“EP05 – Patrick Hanley of Hanley Innovations”, Talking CFD Podcast, March 29, 2016

“Stallion 3D and OpenVSP”, OpenVSP Workshop 2015, August 2015

Join our List of Innovative Customers

Universities, Research Labs and Companies

Our customers leverage their design and engineering expertise with our software to deliver outstanding products and services. A selection is shown below.

A partial list of our customers can be found here.

Why Teams Choose Hanley Innovations

Accurate & Practical

Validated methods aimed at real design decisions.

Fast on a PC

Run on a standard Windows desktop or laptops.

Straightforward Workflow

From geometry to results with clear steps.