The firm was founded by Dr. C. W. "Tony" Hirt, previously a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Hirt is known for having pioneered the volume of fluid method (VOF) for tracking and locating the free surface or fluid-fluid interface.

T Hirt[1][2] left LANL and founded Flow Science in 1980 to develop CFD software for industrial and scientific applications using the VOF method .

FLOW-3D software uses a fractional areas/volumes approach called FAVOR for defining problem geometry, and a free-gridding technique for mesh generation.

[13] Researchers at DuPont used FLOW-3D to optimize coating processes for a solution-coated active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) display technology.