Continue to Site

3D CAD World

Over 50,000 3D CAD Tips & Tutorials. 3D CAD News by applications and CAD industry news.

Ansys

Ansys 2023 R2 powers innovation with simulation

By Leave a Comment

The latest release from Ansys 2023 R2 enables distributed engineering teams with new technologies and improved performance to drive industry innovation forward. It combines an exceptional range of enhanced numerics capabilities, performance improvements, and cross-disciplinary engineering solutions to equip organizations with advanced physics solvers, scalable GPU-based computing, and seamless workflows.

In Ansys 2023 R2, a full EV power electronics electrothermal workflow provides solutions from power IC, to package, to board with Ansys SIwave-CPA and Ansys Q3D Extractor (pictured).

“From semiconductor manufacturers to electric vehicle makers and autonomous aircraft developers, our latest software release empowers these organizations with scalable digital engineering workflows that are critical to digital transformation,” said Shane Emswiler, senior vice president of products at Ansys. “Virtual design and development is at the forefront of transformational innovation within leading organizations across industries, and we are helping to make this a reality.”

Industries innovate and collaborate with digital engineering

Advanced electronics are critical to next-gen product designs like electric vehicles (EVs), vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and life-saving medical devices. These products depend on new semiconductor and integrated circuit (IC) technologies and advanced electronic capabilities. Innovations like high-density 3D-ICs enable product development teams to pack more features in a smaller space, but those compact form factors complicate thermal, electromagnetic (EM), and power challenges. All major semiconductor foundries have certified Ansys solutions for their most advanced technology nodes, and Ansys electrothermal solutions are essential to reliable 3D-IC design.

The latest updates to Ansys RedHawk-SC, a multiphysics sign-off solution for semiconductors, significantly accelerate thermal analysis workflows. A complete EM simulation and modeling chain for IC design integrates the Ansys High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS), Ansys Q3D Extractor parasitic extraction analysis, and the Ansys RaptorX EM solver. Additionally, Ansys EMC Plus (formerly Ansys EMA3D Cable) now offers a full electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) workflow. New, integrated features in 2023 R2 enable engineers to efficiently meet high-tech challenges amid increasingly complex product requirements.

Specific industry sectors like healthcare, automotive, and aerospace also benefit from Ansys digital engineering workflows in 2023 R2. A full EV power electronics electrothermal workflow provides solutions from power IC, to package, to board with Ansys SIwave-CPA for signal integrity, power integrity, and EMI analysis, and the Ansys Q3D Extractor parasitic extraction tool. EV designers can also use simulation to visualize sound sonograms and model brand-defining acoustics with an integrated Ansys Motion and Ansys Sound workflow.

Engineers in aerospace and defense, as well as automotive industries, will benefit from the new digital safety collaboration platform in Ansys medini analyze 2023 R2, which serves as a central safety project hub across an organization. A new Ansys Digital Safety Manager web app replaces the existing desktop client, enabling centralized planning, monitoring, and validation of medini safety and cybersecurity projects.

“As a systems supplier for passenger cars, commercial vehicles, and industrial technology, ZF Friedrichshafen AG places great emphasis on agility and innovation,” said Gunter Gabelein, safety assessor at ZF Friedrichshafen AG. “To support exciting developments like autonomous driving and electric mobility, our R&D process must be fast, cost-effective, and technically precise. More and more projects are taking advantage of synergies provided by medini analyze. In a medium-size project, more than 300 hours of effort can be saved by the one-tool solution and the interfaces to third-party tools for architectures. ZF is a strong advocate for model-based engineering, and medini analyze helps to reduce the complexity of analysis for embedded systems.”

Speed simulation with large-scale computing

Ansys 2023 R2 enables users to run large jobs and help overcome hardware capacity limitations with high-performance computing (HPC), both on-premises and in the cloud. Enhanced solver algorithms capitalize on GPUs to speed simulation. In Ansys 2023 R2, the Fluids product line enables additional industrial simulations to run natively on GPUs, substantially reducing solve time and total power consumption. For example, 2023 R2 extends multi-GPU support to sliding mesh, compressible flows, and eddy dissipation model combustion simulations. That means analysis of internal combustion engines, centrifugal pumps and fans, turbochargers and compressors, stirred tanks and reactors, and hydraulic machinery can now be supercharged with the Ansys Fluent multi-GPU solver.

The Ansys Discovery simulation-driven 3D design tool is even more predictively accurate with live structural physics while reducing GPU memory requirements for thin structures by up to 10X. Subdivision geometry modeling in Discovery provides a new way to create and edit complex parts, enabling users to see the results of “what-if” changes almost instantly for many popular computer-aided design (CAD) models, including topology optimization results. Discovery has grown from providing four features in 2019 to 50 in 2023 R2, including turbulence models, electromagnetics, and manufacturing constraints.

Ansys Speos optical system design software also takes advantage of GPU acceleration. Optical simulations that use ray tracing are now fully supported. Speos also supports 3D irradiance with GPU acceleration, enabling designers to better analyze light contributions. At the photon level, Ansys Lumerical simulation tools have a new Express Mode in the finite difference time domain (FDTD) solver that enables users to run simulations with NVIDIA GPUs.

By integrating Ansys advanced simulation numerics and supercharging simulation with HPC via GPUs and cloud computing, the latest release enables engineers and researchers in every industry to take advantage of the transformative power of digital engineering.

Learn more about Ansys 2023 R2: ansys.com/products/release-highlights

Ansys launches an AI virtual assistant for better customer support

By Leave a Comment

Expanding artificial intelligence (AI) integration across its simulation portfolio and customer community, Ansys announced the limited beta release of AnsysGPT, a multilingual, conversational, AI virtual assistant set to revolutionize the way Ansys customers receive support. Developed using state-of-the-art ChatGPT technology available via the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, AnsysGPT uses well-sourced Ansys public data to answer technical questions concerning Ansys products, relevant physics, and engineering topics within one comprehensive tool.

Expected in early 2024, AnsysGPT will optimize technical support for customers — delivering information and solutions more efficiently, furthering the democratization of simulation. While currently in beta testing with select customers and channel partners, upon its full release next year AnsysGPT will provide easily accessible 24/7 technical support through the Ansys website. Unlike general AI virtual assistants that use unsupported information, AnsysGPT is trained using Ansys data to generate tailored, applicable responses drawn from reliable Ansys resources including, but not limited to, Ansys Innovation Courses, technical documentation, blog articles, and how-to-videos. Strong controls were put in place to ensure that no proprietary information of any kind was used during the training process, and that customer inputs are not stored or used to train the system in any way.

AnsysGPT screenshot
Shown here is an example of a question and response from AnsysGPT, which uses Ansys public data to generate tailored, applicable responses drawn from reliable Ansys resources. Image courtesy of Ansys.

“Ansys consistently delivers innovative solutions for its customers and with the beta release of AnsysGPT, Ansys once again stands at the forefront of the latest and most advanced technology,” said Erke Wang, managing director at CADFEM, an Elite Ansys Channel Partner. “By progressing customer support with AI-powered services, AnsysGPT will assist our team in delivering adaptive intelligence combined with expertise and training that empowers Ansys customers to extract even more value from Ansys solutions.”

In addition to providing expedited technical support, AnsysGPT will encourage customers’ individual learning and development by identifying appropriate resources to further examine specific topics of interest, including how AI/machine learning (ML) can enhance Ansys simulation.

“When trained responsibly, AI-powered virtual services can be a huge asset to both organizations and customers. AnsysGPT has been trained using Ansys data, which increases its reliability for Ansys customers,” said Anthony Dawson, vice president of customer excellence at Ansys. “Further, AnsysGPT complements existing AI integration across Ansys’ portfolio, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers that leverage AI/ML to improve turbulence models, structural tools that apply AI/ML to predict computational spend, and process integration and design optimization software that employs AI/ML to efficiently build reduced order models. We are confident AnsysGPT will add great value to our customer experience, providing more seamless support and useful information for Ansys customers.”

Ansys
ansys.com

Using simulation to keep the holidays warm

By Leave a Comment

By Jason Shar, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Consulting Engineer, Rand Simulation

The holiday season is once again upon us! This means peace on Earth, good will towards others, and embracing the spirit of giving. For those of us living in colder climates, though, this also means the worst of holiday humbugs: your precious coffee, hot cocoa, teas, and toddies cooling at an alarmingly fast rate. This grinch of holiday cheer is known to all, whether naughty or nice, and is a critical problem that needs investigating. Fortunately, the good folks here at Rand SIM decided caroling was not the best use of our time and got to work using computational fluid dynamics to bring comfort and joy (and a little warmth) back to your beverage.

While a Christmas list’s worth of products are available to help keep your beverage hot, nothing quite makes the holidays as happy as a good old-fashioned ceramic coffee cup. Now, this begs the question: does your beverage stay holly-jolly longer when you let it sit on a nearby yuletide table, or is it better to hold on to it? Though we can test this in real life, the cost of two ruined beverages is just too high to bear. Fortunately, ANSYS Fluent allows us to simulate this test case without any waste!

Leveraging SpaceClaim’s powerful geometric generation features, two models were quickly created. The first featured a coffee cup full of your favorite hot beverage sitting undisturbed on a flat surface (Fig. 1A). A helping hand was needed for the second model, which was easily found online, imported into SpaceClaim, positioned into place, and mirrored to give your favorite beverage some extra holiday cheer (Fig. 1B). Air volumes were created around both models, so the thermal effects could be seen a bit more clearly.

The simulations were set up by modeling convection with care in Ansys Fluent, and made use of the Boussinesq approximation for air density. Each beverage started at the perfect 155 °F in room temperature (71 °F), and, after allowing the fluid domains to reach a steady state, were simulated for 30 minutes.

While it’s hard to tell which case gave the best present, we can instantly see that the thermal plume generated by the hands might help keep the Winter Wonderland from our drink.

With monitor reports, we shall play! Simulations give us the added benefit of measuring anything, and everything, we could ever want. I investigated the temperature of the beverage both in its volume (Fig. 2A) and on its surface (Fig. 2B), and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a real reason to deck the halls!

It seems as though holding on to the cup keeps the beverage a little warmer after 30 minutes (0.1% and 0.3% increase in volume- and surface-averaged temperature, respectively, vs. letting it sit on the table), with the added benefit of warming one’s hands on a cold winter’s day.

Happy holidays, and drinking, to all, and to all a good night!

 

Jason A. Shar is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) consulting engineering at RandSim. He is a former recipient for the STEM fellowship awarded from the Ohio Space Grant Consortium hosted by NASA, and was a sponsored postdoctoral researcher through Kennesaw State University. Prior to breaking out in industry, he had been involved in academia for at least 10 years and had recently earned his PhD in Engineering with a focus in Medical and Biological Systems from Wright State University. During this time, he developed a wealth of experience related to learning and the dissemination of knowledge. His training and research experience have provided him with strong and broad backgrounds in the fields of mechanical engineering, numerical modeling, including CFD, finite element analysis, and fluid-structure interaction, and clinical image processing. As a result of this breakthrough research, he was able to publish 5 peer-reviewed articles in high-quality journals (average impact factor: 4.127, 37 citations), co-author one book chapter, and presented 12 papers at national and international conferences. Notably, he was awarded a top spot, twice, in an international conference’s bachelor’s and PhD student paper competitions.

For your Halloween fun – simulating flame in a pumpkin

By Leave a Comment

Adam Weaver, Director of Engineering, Rand Simulation

We’re getting into the spirit here at RandSim, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to play around with combustion modelling in Fluent. Though I had worked for many years in the turbomachinery CFD space, I was focused on the aero/thermal side, working either in heat transfer modelling of the cooled blades, or in the compressor/turbine aerodynamics. That is to say – upstream or downstream of the combustor, but never the combustion itself. Others on my team have done combustion modelling, so I figure I’d give it a try!

Once I dove in, I found it followed much of the familiar path of learning something new in ANSYS. I start out intimidated by what I don’t know until I crack open the user guide, put one mouse click in front of the other and soon enough I’m looking back at the end-result wondering why it took me so long to try. I thought I’d chronicle a bit of my path here, not on the specifics of combustion modelling, but more on the journey of learning a new feature in ANSYS.

First, I started where I’m very familiar, geometry modelling and meshing. I found a model file of a pumpkin online, and it imported into SpaceClaim cleanly and passed all geometry checks. It did have a removable lid, but for my purposes I didn’t need it, so I merged the bodies together. Then I cut a hole in the top, and added a cylinder in the middle to represent a candle with a small, indented surface to act as the fuel inlet. Last, I grabbed an image of our RandSIM logo and overlayed it on the pumpkin and traced out a cut in the pumpkin face.

Pumpkin geometry in SpaceClaim using image projection to cut logo

I then created an air volume around it, named all my surfaces and proceeded into Fluent meshing. From there, I used the watertight meshing workflow with Poly-Hexcore selected as the volume fill. I used mostly default settings for the mesh, with the exception of increasing the number of buffer layers to 6 to give a bit more mesh quality around where I expected a dancing flame and airflow around the pumpkin.

Mosaic Mesh of Pumpkin created using Watertight Meshing Workflow

So far, this was all familiar territory, but once I got into Fluent and was preparing to set up the combustion model, I knew I needed to get some material to reference. Luckily ANSYS has some fantastic places to find this information. The very first thing I did was select the Non-Premixed Combustion model within the Species dialog box and click the Help button. This (like the Help button in all dialog boxes) sent me directly to the relevant section in the Fluent User’s Guide, and described the meaning and use for each button or input field on this box. Furthermore, for when I need a bit more information on the mathematical models used, (such as the Diffusion Flamelet Models), I can click on those relevant links to be sent to the Fluent Theory Guide.

Example Snippet from Fluent Theory Guide

 

The user guide is really the best way to get quick info for specific setup options when working through a problem, but for my case, I was not aware of where to start and needed a bit more of a workflow demonstration. For that, I turned to the Ansys Learning Hub. I navigated to the Fluids Building and found a learning room specifically for Fluent Combustion Modelling with a few instructor-led recordings, and folders of training material with lecture slides and workshops. If I wanted to become more deeply involved in combustion, I would go through all the content there, but for now I just wanted to get a feel for the Non-Premixed combustion model, so I navigated to that folder and brought up both the lecture slides and the workshop slides. The workshop was reasonably close to my scenario (though obviously not of a pumpkin), so I was able to start there and just apply the settings they used to my problem with a few slight modifications, referencing the lecture slides whenever I needed clarification on what a setting meant.

For post processing, I created a few scene views where the flame structure itself was visualized via multiple levels of iso-surfaces around the combustion by-products. And then I just colored those with the “flame” contour type for a good visual. I set the animation to export every timestep and then saved the video file at the end.

In addition to creating a fun Halloween visual, this serves as a great case study in how easy it is to learn something new in Ansys by using the quick access available resources. The user and theory guides provide for quick reference of specific input fields and features, and the learning hub provides deeper descriptions for specific workflows and physics types. It doesn’t take long to learn something new, so feel free to experiment and let us know if you would like further information on anything you find!

 

 

Ansys offers a way to protect your Christmas ornaments

By Leave a Comment

By Spencer Crandall

Around this time each year, families around the world gather to decorate their Christmas trees. Unfortunately, we’ve all lost an ornament to a clumsy family member, a domestic pet, or a sagging tree. In the spirit of protecting the sentimental ornaments in our lives, we’re going to use Ansys to discuss the topic of safely decorating with glass ornaments. We’ll do this by using the Ansys drop test wizard ACT extension to look at a representative glass ornament falling from varying heights. We’ll go over some simple considerations during setup, material models available, and ultimately what height you can safely drop a glass ornament and expect it to survive.

Jumping right into the tools that we’ll need to run this drop test analysis; we can go into our ACT manager and make sure that the Mechanical Drop Test Wizard ACT extension is loaded.

Next up will be finding the proper materials for our model. Thankfully, Ansys includes a library of explicit material models, which we can use in lieu of hunting down the complex, rate-dependent, brittle response, material properties that we will need. We will be using the Floatglass material, which uses the Johnson-Holmquist Strength model. This material model will allow us to show plasticity and damage along with material fracture.

Moving into the explicit module inside of Ansys Workbench, we’ll launch the Drop Test Wizard, which will expedite the setup process. This can be found in the Environment context menu when you have the Explicit Dynamics object selected in the outline.

1. Using the Drop Test Wizard we can complete the following steps:
2. Orientation of the target surface and imported geometry
3. Creation of the target surface
4. Meshing
5. Set initial velocity based on drop height
6. Set analysis end time and analysis preference to Drop Test
7. Establish body interaction contact behavior (frictionless or frictional)

With the setup described, we can iterate on our drop height until our glass ornament experiences a failure as shown in the following GIFs (click on each to play).

 

Our analyses indicate that you can safely hang your glass ornaments no higher than 40 inches. Keeping that height restriction in mind will help you and yours keep safety at the forefront of all your Christmas tree decorating parties.
Spencer Crandall, Simulation Specialist – FEA at Rand Simulation
Spencer is an experienced mechanical engineer with a demonstrated history of leading technical programs in the aerospace industry. He has a strong background in additive manufacturing, mechanical design, value and process engineering, and FEA (ANSYS APDL).

Keysight expands relationship with Ansys for wireless design workflow products

By Leave a Comment

Keysight Technologies, Inc., a leading technology company that delivers advanced design and validation solutions to help accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, announced an expanded collaboration with Ansys to integrate Keysight’s PathWave Advanced Design System (ADS) RFPro environment with Ansys HFSS electromagnetic simulation.

As a result of this collaboration, radio frequency (RF) and microwave engineers can eliminate the time-consuming bottleneck of manually coupling design tools to simplify workflow and improve time-to-market. The initial collaboration between the two companies, originally announced in February 2021, improved the workflow between the companies products to speed time-to-market for 5G, aerospace and defense, as well as automotive applications.

“Keysight’s PathWave framework helps customers get to market faster from design through production. Developing open interfaces between design and test software products, enables end-to-end workflow solutions across system/circuit design, verification and manufacturing,” stated Tom Lillig, general manager of Keysight PathWave Software Solutions. “We have expanded PathWave beyond Keysight products, to connect Ansys HFSS with PathWave ADS RFPro. This partnership enables customers to solve large, complex development challenges, even faster.”

Keysight’s RFPro simulation solution is an electromagnetic (EM) environment for RF and microwave circuit designers and is seamlessly integrated within Keysight PathWave ADS. RFPro makes performing EM analysis easy, simplifying EM-circuit co-simulation and saving hours to weeks of simulation setup time.

“Ansys is committed to building world-class products in an open ecosystem,” said Steve Pytel, vice president of Ansys Product Management. “Collaborating with Keysight complements this strategy, enabling Keysight and Ansys to provide comprehensive solutions that address our customers’ engineering challenges.”

Keysight’s ADS RFPro was introduced in PathWave ADS 2019 and has generated broad adoption within the ADS user community. Keysight is now addressing customers’ larger workflow challenges with PathWave workflow solutions. HFSS is a trusted, widely used, finite element method (FEM) solver and now in addition to Momentum and Keysight FEM, ADS design engineers have access to HFSS as an additional simulation option within ADS RFPro.

Steve Pytel, vice president of Ansys Product Management also commented, “Many customers couple Keysight’s PathWave ADS and RFPro for RF circuit design with Ansys HFSS to verify and validate their assembled RF modules. The manual process to move design files between tools is time consuming and can create bottlenecks — especially as die-counts increase for complex RF modules in applications like 5G and 6G. We are collaborating with Keysight to alleviate this pain point — ultimately creating an efficient workflow that drives fast results for our mutual customers and spurs innovation within the industry.”

The PathWave ADS RFPro HFSS link option will be available in Keysight’s ADS 2022 and is expected to ship in the summer of 2021.

Keysight Technologies
www.keysight.com

Rand Simulation launches program to help customers achieve faster ROI and adoption of Ansys products

By Leave a Comment

Rand Simulation, a division of Rand Worldwide, announces that it has launched the Ansys Development and Ongoing Proficiency Training (ADOPT) program. As an Ansys Certified Elite Channel Partner, Rand Simulation developed this program to provide customers using the Ansys simulation toolset along with on-going help ranging from onboarding to navigating complex projects. With guidance from a dedicated Rand Simulation expert in fluids, structures or electronics, the ADOPT program drives both individual and team productivity and innovation in product development through collaboration with a dedicated subject-matter-expert.

“Ansys has a phenomenal resource in their Ansys Learning Hub (ALH), which includes over a thousand learning assets such as self-paced videos and tutorials, but with so much material and diversity in user backgrounds and use-cases, the fastest way to proficiency is to identify what’s most relevant,” says Jason Pfeiffer, vice president, Rand Simulation. “Our team developed a program that integrates a seasoned engineer who understands the customer’s use cases as well as the Ansys technology — a strategic guide who can collaboratively map out a route for tremendous proficiency gains and business success. They streamline and reinforce each individual user’s learning path, while conducting open knowledge-sharing sessions that help keep the customer’s design, engineering and analysis teams running at peak performance.”

In the first 90 days, a Rand Simulation expert paves the foundation for success through a discovery session, creates a customized learning path and facilitates reinforcement sessions designed to ensure the entire team is onboard and headed in the right direction with the necessary resources to achieve their proficiency objectives. This happens within a secure customer portal embedded within the ALH so all the meeting notes, Q&As, hand-selected tutorials, certificates of training completion and recorded coaching sessions are accessible to every team member.

“Rand Simulation is an Ansys Elite Partner because they continually find ways to shorten the time it takes for customers to receive tangible ROI from the Ansys toolset,” says Rodger Zhao, senior manager of professional services, Ansys. “Their ADOPT program is an example of harnessing the power of the Ansys Learning Hub to support customers throughout their journey and the benefits that can occur when education, consulting and mentorship are rolled up into one tightly integrated and customized package.”

Rand Simulation
www.randsim.com/adopt

Ansys Innovation courses drive remote learning to educate the next generation of engineers

By Leave a Comment

Ansys is reshaping how engineering students learn physics principles through the launch of free, online Ansys Innovation Courses, a new addition to the Ansys Academic Program. Accelerating the future of engineering education, the on-demand program integrates real-world simulation case studies within physics theory short courses to teach complicated physics concepts and phenomena.

As universities worldwide shuttered to reduce the spread of COVID-19, many physics-based curriculums pivoted from classroom-based instruction to online learning. Only by coupling online courses with the power of simulation can students visualize and reinforce complicated physics concepts. From undergraduates beginning their engineering journey to professionals mastering new skills, Ansys Innovation Courses lower the barrier to quickly learning physics with simulation-based lessons that span many physics principles.

Ansys Innovation Courses extend beyond physics theory and reinforce concepts with high-fidelity Ansys simulations and real-world case studies. Available to anyone but developed for students and early-career engineers, Ansys Innovation Courses’ comprehensive educational experience features online lecture videos led by Ansys experts, handouts, homework, tutorials and quizzes. The program also includes several courses from Ansys’ academic partners, such as Cornell University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC).

“Ansys Innovation Courses provide students with a unique online learning environment that no textbook can match. I’m proud to help contribute to this important initiative through the development of electromagnetics instruction materials,” said Kathryn Leigh Smith, assistant professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UNCC. “Supplementation of lecture material with animations and demonstrations that leverage cutting-edge Ansys simulations enables students to fully grasp these fundamental principles, and their application to solving today’s engineering challenges.”

“In these uncertain times, remote learning has become the new normal. Ansys Innovation Courses empower students to supplement their traditional education, take control of their own learning and rapidly absorb physics concepts,” said Prith Banerjee, chief technology officer at Ansys and executive sponsor of the Ansys Academic Program. “Merging the two worlds of physics theory instruction with simulation delivers a dynamic new way for students to learn — both at the grassroots undergraduate level and for engineers seeking to refresh their skillsets.”

Ansys
www.ansys.com

Aras licenses platform to ANSYS in strategic OEM deal

By Leave a Comment

Aras, a platform provider for digital industrial applications, announced a strategic partnership with ANSYS that includes the licensing of the Aras platform technology to enable the next generation of digital engineering practices.

ANSYS will leverage the underlying Aras platform technologies such as configuration management, PDM/PLM interoperability, API integration and add simulation specific capabilities to deliver scalable and configurable products that connect simulation and optimization to the business of engineering.

Organizations are leveraging simulation throughout the product lifecycle, interoperating with their existing PLM, ALM and ERP applications. Additionally, customers must address scale and complexity challenges with data and process management, traceability and availability of simulation results across the lifecycle.

ANSYS is leveraging Aras’ resilient platform services combined with its proven simulation domain expertise and technology for new product offerings to improve productivity and maximize business value from simulation investments. ANSYS will deliver commercial offerings for simulation process and data management, process integration, design optimization and simulation-driven data science.

ANSYS, Inc.
www.ansys.com

Aras
www.aras.com

RBF Morph speeds real-time design-data feedback

By Leave a Comment

As engineers in industry and research look to develop Digital Twins of their physical products—with the longer-term goal of integration with the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)—the pivotal importance of up-front, accurate, real-time modeling and simulation to optimize both manufacturing and product performance is clear.

Enabling the development of this function is RBF Morph, a technology embedded within ANSYS’ newly released R3 version of its advanced engineering software suite, in particular the ANSYS Twin Builder systems-design tool. Also available as a standalone product, RBF Morph provides advanced mesh-morphing capabilities that enable rapid prediction of the outcomes of design changes. Based on radial basis functions (RBF) the software is used to drive mesh-smoothing (morphing) from source points and their displacements.

Mesh morphing is needed for reduced-order modeling (ROM), which allows physics-based analysis of product performance and durability to be carried out more accurately and in much less time than traditional methods. “Developing ROM within ANSYS has been a priority for us,” says Michel Rochette, Director of Research at ANSYS. “Merging physics-based understanding with manufacturing analytics delivers the insights that unlock the value of the Digital Twin. The mathematical techniques behind ROM require that everything has the same mesh topology for all the geometrical parameters in your model—and RBF Morph provides that.”

RBF Morph has been offered within ANSYS Mechanical and ANSYS Fluent CFD capabilities for several years. The new coupling with Twin Builder underscores the value of the technology to Digital-Twin functionality, which optimizes control of a company’s product and/or equipment assets. “If you want to include real-time 3D simulation in your Digital-Twin approach it is mandatory to have the approximation that a reduced-order model can provide,” says Rochette. “The future of the IIoT is being built on that, thanks to ROM and RBF Morph.”

Industrial application with RBF Morph – RINA

RINA, a leading global provider of engineering consulting for industrial services and advanced technology, has an ongoing partnership with RBF Morph to offer Digital-Twin-based workflows for product development. (RINA, ANSYS, RBF Morph and others are currently partnering in a 4-million Euros project on medical digital twins: meditate-project.eu).

RINA uses RBF Morph design technology to explore a turbine blade’s design space quickly and determine the effects of design changes.

For a turbine-blade project, RINA was looking for a methodology to quickly predict how any redesigns would affect the blade’s structural response and aerodynamics. The goal was to modify the curved fillet region at the root of the blade to reduce the stress concentration and increase service life by limiting fatigue.

Rather than create a new geometry, mesh and simulation for each design iteration, RINA used RBF Morph, in conjunction with ANSYS Mechanical, to explore the blade’s design space efficiently and determine the effects of design changes.

Meshing the original blade design and using finite element analysis (FEA), the engineers calculated a maximum principal stress of about 195 MPa; the stress peak occurred close to the point where the cross section of the blade had an important geometrical variation. The engineers were looking to smooth out the force and reduce peak stress by adopting a larger radius at the root of the fillet.

The RBF Morph process RINA used involved varying the positions of two curves that controlled the shape of the fillet. First the mesh’s nodes were extracted to follow the new shape of the fillet; the engineers specified how the nodes could move as the mesh’s volume morphed along the new curves. They were also able to define nodes that stayed fixed during the morph. With the right inputs, the engineers were able to control the morphing process so the volume and surfaces deformed smoothly and properly. Ultimately 125,000 nodes were updated in just 15 seconds to accommodate the deformation without excessively degrading the quality of the mesh.

SPINNER uses RBF Morph technology to asses the geometry of different sizes of vertebral screws.

With their RBF Morph procedure established, RINA’s engineers then carried out a two-parameter optimization of the fillet control points using response surface methods, design of experiments (DoE) and parallel plots. These tools allowed the engineers to identify the optimal blade design where the stress was spread out and had a smaller peak. The result: a substantial stress reduction of 22.5 percent in the optimal blade design.

“We found that using RBF Morph was intuitive, effective, and fast,” says Emiliano Costa, Senior Engineering Specialist for Industrial Design & CAE at RINA. “We now include RBF Morph in our design processes to help us more quickly develop better solutions for our customers.”

“This RBF Morph/ROM shape-parametrization methodology used by RINA to optimize turbine blade designs enables the ‘squeezing’ of high-fidelity CAE simulations into real-time Digital Twins,” says RBF Morph founder and CTO Marco Evangelos Biancolini. “When integrated via the IIoT, the technology is ultimately intended to support field-equipment maintenance—tracking performance and predicting or detecting worn parts in need of repair or redesign.”

Medical application with RBF Morph – SPINNER

SPINNER is a European Community-funded doctoral training program aimed at early-stage bioengineering researchers, with the goal of training them to design the next generation of repair materials and techniques for spine surgery. A recent project focused on the planning of surgeries to treat vertebral fractures, which are often repaired by means of rods and screws implanted directly into a patient’s individual vertebral bodies. SPINNER Ph.D. candidate Marco Sensale carried out a sensitivity analysis supported by RBF Morph to estimate the influence of the size of the screw on the amount of stress in the screw and strain in the vertebra.

“The two parameters that determine the size of commercial medical screws are the length and the diameter, which have to be chosen during the planning for each individual patient,” Sensale says. “This choice is often based on anatomic measures as well as the experience of the surgeon. By modeling Digital Twins of individual vertebras and screws that have different geometries we can rapidly perform simulations to identify which relationships between different parameters will lead to surgical success for a particular patient.”

Sensale used RBF technology to update only the nodal positions of his models, instead of remeshing the geometry every time as he changed the length of the screw. This provided results more quickly with each iteration. He also modelled an offset to the lateral surface of the screw in a similar fashion in order to explore the stress resulting from different screw diameters (Image B2). Preliminary results of this ongoing study show the least amount of overall stress (MPa) within those screws that are slightly longer and wider in diameter.

A second arm of the research examined peak minimum principal strain in the vertebra itself (Image B3) after implantation of a screw. Preliminary results indicate the least percentage of strain in the bone when a slightly wider, longer screw is used.

With research ongoing, Sensale says, “We are working to provide quantitative information to support surgeons in their decision-making and RBF Morph tool is providing us with a valuable tool for this project.” Adds RBF’s Biancolini, “Thanks to medical Digital Twins like those being created for this SPINNER project, surgeons will be able to plan for, practice, and achieve the best outcomes for each patient they treat.”

Availability for both commercial and student applications

Biancolini, Associate Professor of Machine Design at the University of Rome, appreciates the broad reach of applications for which his software is being used. “Digital Twins are the future of enterprises of all sizes,” he says. “Now that large solver capacity and high-performance computing are available and considered standard resources for product design, a wide range of industry users can take advantage of our technology to help them optimize their designs at lightening speeds.”

RBF Morph technology is offered to ANSYS users in two products: an ACT Extension for ANSYS Mechanical and an add-on for ANSYS Fluent. The ACT Extension is available on the ANSYS App Store both as a commercial version and both as a no-cost version as a companion to the Free Academic software of ANSYS.

RBF Morph
Rbf-morph.com

3D CAD World - Copyright © 2023 · WTWH Media LLC and its licensors. All rights reserved.
The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of WTWH Media.

Privacy Policy