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CFD

Siemens extends Simcenter STAR-CCM+ capabilities

March 9, 2021 By WTWH Editor Leave a Comment

Siemens Digital Industries Software announces the availability of the latest release of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ software. This release of the multi-physics computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software includes new features to help engineers model the complexity of today’s products and explore design possibilities to engineer innovation faster than ever. Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is part of the Simcenter portfolio of simulation and test solutions within Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio of integrated software and services.

Siemens has expanded the capabilities of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ related to turbomachinery, delivering improved productivity and increased insight into performance for better engineering decisions. Across industries and applications, CFD engineers can benefit from increased productivity through consistent use of best practices and speeding the exploration of design possibilities. Simcenter STAR-CCM+ users can now open simulation files in read-only mode without consuming a license, giving users greater ability to check the set-up, make comparisons and leverage best practices across many simulations.

With Surrogate Models in Design Manager, engineers can predict the performance of thousands of variants either locally around the design of interest to analyze probability of failure, or globally across the design space to quickly create a database of performance results that can be leveraged by the simulation team.

Additionally, Simcenter STAR-CCM+ can now better model the complexity of today’s products through electromagnetic simulations. For all applications with electric circuits, including electric machines, circuit breakers and batteries, engineers can now save significant time with the new Electric Circuit Editor. Engineers can readily sketch sophisticated circuits with an easy-to-use and intuitive graphical interface, enhancing usability of the circuit model and saving valuable engineering time. This release further expands electromagnetic application coverage for electric machines with the introduction of a new excitation coil model, allowing the design of higher power density machines with closed coils such as those found in axial flux machines.

Siemens Digital Industries Software
www.sw.siemens.com/en-US/

 

Filed Under: CFD, Siemens Digital Industries Software Tagged With: Siemensdigitalindustriessoftware

OnScale and Lexma launch Moebius LBM CFD Solver for advanced fluid dynamics simulations

June 9, 2020 By WTWH Editor Leave a Comment

OnScale, a global leader in Cloud Engineering Simulation, announces the availability of the Moebius Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver on the OnScale Cloud Engineering Simulation platform.

“Moebius represents a step-change in CFD speed, power, and democratization for digital prototyping of devices involving fluid flows,” says David Freed, CTO of OnScale and a Digital Physicist with a 25-year track record of advancing LBM CFD technology at MIT, Exa Corporation, and Dassault Systѐmes. “Moebius running on the massively scalable OnScale Cloud Engineering Simulation platform will break barriers to innovation for a variety of applications such as lab-on-a-chip, MEMS, and medical diagnostic and treatment devices like next-generation ventilators and respirators.”

Airflow simulation in a UV sterilization chamber of an iPAP ventilator for COVID-19 patients.

Unlike Navier-Stokes CFD methods which simulate bulk fluid flow, LBM takes a kinetic theory approach to simulating fluid flows, which enables the simulation of complex biomedical and engineering problems, including multiphase flows (e.g. simulating control and management of multi-species droplets in microfluidic devices), particle transport (e.g. simulating sorting of blood and cancer tumor cells), and fluid-structure interaction (e.g. simulating efficient micro-scale actuators in MEMS applications). The resulting simulations provide unique insight and design guidance for engineers advancing new technologies.

Combining the power of the Moebius solver with the massive scalability of OnScale in the cloud enables both huge simulations and parallel execution of large numbers of simulations on cloud supercomputers.

“Integrating Moebius with the OnScale Cloud Engineering Simulation platform allows our team to focus on our mission – creating the world’s best LBM CFD solutions – while leveraging OnScale’s cloud supercomputer scalability and SimAPI for CAD import, model setup, data management, and viewing simulation results,” says Franck Pérot, CEO of Lexma Technologies. “We also get OnScale’s account management, billing, customer support, and marketing and sales automation features built-in.”

Fighting COVID-19 in Low-Income Countries: How Digital Prototyping Empowers Engineers to Advance the Design of Medical Devices

“With Moebius running on OnScale, we were able to optimize the design of our Intelligent Positive Air Pressure (iPAP) machine with UV disinfecting chamber,” says Shashi Buluswar, CEO of the Institute for Transformative Technology (ITT). “Using OnScale and Moebius to create Digital Prototypes of our device dramatically shortened our physical prototyping cost and time and allowed us to accelerate our goal of delivering critical iPAP devices to low-income countries to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Left to right: Simulation iterations from a suboptimal design to an optimized configuration of the iPAP UV sterilizer chamber.

A critical design and engineering aspect of the iPAP device is the UV disinfecting chamber, which is intended to disinfect up to 99.9% of the air exhaled from a COVID-19 patient’s lungs. The ITT team needed to minimize size, cost, and heat generated by the chamber while maximizing the amount of time air spends in it. The team used Moebius running on OnScale to simulate many “Digital Prototypes” of the disinfecting chamber and process until converging on a winning, manufacturable design.

OnScale
ww.OnScale.com

Lexma Technology
www.lexma-tech.com

Filed Under: CFD, Company News, News, Simulation Software Tagged With: onscale

enGits: Task-specific CFD software and services

February 27, 2019 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

Bruce Jenkins | Ora Research

enGits GmbH is a highly specialized software developer and engineering service provider based in the town of Todtnau in Germany’s Black Forest, with more than 20 years’ experience in developing and applying simulation technology, especially in the field of CFD. enGits describes itself as a “competent partner for engineering simulation solutions. Our main strength is the field of fluid dynamics, but we are also often confronted with problems from different fields. Our applications range from ventilation in tunnels and the oil-and-gas industry all the way to space applications.”

“Software-independent consultancy”

enGits offers what it terms “software-independent consultancy, because we do not believe in one perfect software which fits all problems.” The company explains its philosophy and business approach: “Several good open-source tools exist which enable you to work very cost-effectively. Open-source also enables to tackle certain very specific problems by customizing the software. On the other hand, there are also good proprietary packages which, in many cases, might be the better choice. We use simulation software on a case-by-case basis and we can help you to choose the best software for your task.”

A significant part of enGit’s work “deals with very specific CFD tasks. Usually, these are task which cannot be solved easily with existing off-the-shelf software solutions. The picture below tries to give an impression of such a complex simulation. In this specific case, acoustic loads on the payload fairing of a launch vehicle had to be computed.”

Simulation of acoustic loads on payload fairing of a space launch vehicle.

enGrid: Open-source mesh generation software

At the same time, enGit offers two off-the-shelf software products. One, called enGrid, is open-source mesh generation code for CFD applications. enGrid uses an “in-house development for surface meshing and prismatic boundary layers,” the company says, with a module for hex far-fields planned for the next release. Tetrahedral parts of the mesh are created by calling the Netgen library. Internally, enGrid uses the VTK data structures as well as the *.vtu file format.

Currently enGrid has interfaces to Blender, Gmsh, STL and several other file formats. Gmsh can be used to import STEP and IGES files, and can also be used for simple geometry modeling. Since its 1.2 release, enGrid has provided native export to OpenFOAM, and since release 1.4 to SU2. This includes export capabilities for complete OpenFOAM cases including boundary conditions, as well as support for polyhedral cells. enGrid is released under the GPL, and is a useful addition to the open-source CFD community.

DrNUM: CFD code based on dual-resolution numerics

enGit’s other software product is DrNUM, a CFD code first introduced to the public in 2013 based on a technology called dual-resolution numerics. In contrast to the traditional CFD modeling techniques of either structured or unstructured grid, dual-resolution meshes consist of a set of super-elements with a very simple internal structure. These super-elements are called patches in the DrNUM internal terminology. Patches can be placed in freely overlapping arrangements, and constitute the actual computational grid. The company explains that dual-resolution grids “can be regarded as unstructured grids of super-elements (coarse resolution layer); each super-element, or patch, consists of a highly resolved grid portion which represents the real numerical mesh.”

Large-eddy simulation of pollutant dispersion (approximately 100 million cells) in DrNUM.

At present, DrNUM supports only Cartesian super-elements. The company’s goal for DrNUM is to “achieve an optimal combination of high numerical and algorithmic efficiency within the super-elements, while keeping geometric flexibility on a higher level. This method is thus well suited to run on modern, massively parallel computing devices (e.g., GPUs). It allows processing of flow simulations on the order of dozens of millions of cells on classical single-node desktop computers.”

DrNUM is being developed jointly by enGits GmbH and numrax GmbH, a scientific and engineering organization based in Duisburg, Germany with roots in the local university that specializes in numerical methods for engineering, fluid dynamics, hydrodynamics, aeronautics, energy systems and high-performance computing. A first commercial version of DrNUM will be released in the near future, enGits says.

enGits

numrax

Filed Under: CFD, News Tagged With: engits

Design Manager, STAR-Innovate add fully integrated design exploration, optimization to Siemens’ STAR-CCM+

August 21, 2017 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

Bruce Jenkins, Ora Research

Two new, seamlessly integrated features in the latest release of Siemens’ STAR-CCM+ software for multiphysics computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and analysis enable automated product design exploration and optimization. One is Design Manager, a capability in STAR-CCM+ version 12.04 that lets users easily explore multiple design options within their CFD simulations. The other is STAR-Innovate, built on the proven technology of HEEDS, the multidisciplinary design exploration (MDX) software that Siemens came to own through its 2016 acquisition of CD-adapco, which had previously acquired HEEDS and its developer, Red Cedar Technology. STAR-CCM+, now developed and managed by Siemens PLM Software, is part of the company’s Simcenter portfolio, a robust suite of simulation and test solutions. See our Predictive engineering analytics: Simcenter unifies, advances Siemens PLM’s simulation/test portfolio.

 

Design Manager in STAR-CCM+

“I firmly believe that single-scenario engineering simulations are about to become a thing of the past,” says Siemens PLM Software senior vice president of product management Jean-Claude Ercolanelli. “If you know how to use STAR-CCM+, then you will instinctively know how to use Design Manager. This means that every engineer who installs STAR-CCM+ v12.04 can now conduct design exploration studies with ease to discover better designs, faster.”

“STAR-CCM+ is the only multiphysics CFD offering that seamlessly enables engineers to perform design exploration studies backed by an industrial-strength optimization tool like HEEDS,” Ercolanelli adds. “As a result, engineers can spend less time setting up and monitoring simulations, and more time assessing the outcomes to determine what makes good designs great. This is a game-changer.”

HEEDS: The Pro/E of design space exploration

Our firsthand research among users in global automotive, aerospace, gas turbine and other manufacturing industries confirms HEEDS is a breakthrough technology that at last makes multidisciplinary design exploration easily and readily usable by engineering discipline leads, without their having to become experts in the arcana of design space exploration (DSE) tools and methods—design of experiments, response surface models, scatter plots, Pareto frontiers, stochastic optimization, on and on. Or, as is more often the case, hire an engineering service provider with specialized expertise in DSE in order to gain access to the technology’s benefits.

Indeed, we believe it is not too much to deem HEEDS the “Pro/ENGINEER of design space exploration”—bringing to DSE the same generational leap forward that PTC’s then-revolutionary technology for parametric, feature-based 3D modeling represented over the cumbersome, not very usable or practical solids modelers available to that time. HEEDS is the first in a new wave of software tools that promise finally to bring design space exploration out of its two-decade history as a niche technology applied only in extreme situations, and at last make it a practical everyday engineering tool. Other new-generation DSE tools of this ilk include DATADVANCE pSeven, ESI MINESET, ESTECO modeFRONTIER 2016, Noesis Solutions id8, Phoenix Integration’s newest iteration of ModelCenter, and more.

Design Manager: Automating systematic exploration of designs directly within STAR-CCM+

“Companies are looking for innovative answers to today’s challenging engineering problems to differentiate themselves in the market,” Siemens notes. “Using simulation to explore what is feasible drives this innovation.” To this end, Design Manager lets users set up and automatically evaluate families of designs directly within STAR-CCM+, with capabilities for process management and product performance assessment. Included in every instance of STAR-CCM+ v12.04, Design Manager automates the systematic exploration of designs by evaluating variations in geometry and operating conditions. “It leverages the all-in-one platform, automated meshing, pipelined workflow and accurate physics in STAR-CCM+ to overcome the complexities that have historically prevented many from using CFD simulation in this way,” the company says.

STAR-Innovate add-on: Single- and multi-objective optimization studies intelligently search the design space

The optional STAR-Innovate add-on lets users “take it one step further and perform single- and multi-objective optimization studies to intelligently search the design space using the same time-tested and proven technology found in HEEDS,” Siemens says. The software also provides stochastic analysis to help engineers determine the sensitivity of their simulation predictions to small changes in input parameters, such as manufacturing tolerances on a critical dimension or fluctuations in boundary-condition values.

“Design exploration cannot be a luxury anymore; it needs to be part of the standard engineering process”

As STAR-CCM+ product manager Bahaa Haddoukessouni writes in an illuminating blog post: “For years, simulation has been used with tremendous success to reduce engineering time and costs through validation and troubleshooting. Digital design exploration, however, is often seen as a luxury that cannot be afforded due to the investment needed in purchasing, learning and deploying optimization tools. With today’s business pressures you need to explore the design space early in the engineering process to discover innovative products faster and meet your customer’s expectations. Design exploration cannot be a luxury anymore; it needs to be part of the standard engineering process—and that means removing the barrier to entry that has so long existed.”

“That is why I’m pleased to announce the release of Design Manager,” she continues. “With a single click in STAR-CCM+ you can now create a design exploration project. Without needing any additional licenses, you can get started with any parameter sweep study and access the power of automation. With a single click in STAR-CCM+ you can now create a design exploration project. Without needing any additional licenses, you can get started with any parameter sweep study and access the power of automation. And you know the nice thing? It is part of STAR-CCM+! Meaning you are already familiar with the workflow and you get access to all the important technologies in STAR-CCM+ enabling design exploration.

“What if you want to expand to intelligent optimization? Design Manager gives you access to our best-in-class optimization technology embedded in STAR-CCM+ with the STAR-Innovate add-on license. Traditional methods require you to be an optimization expert to choose and tune algorithms to search an unknown design space. Our hybrid and adaptive approach uses a blend of algorithms to automatically overcome this obstacle.

 

Visual results investigations with Design Manager.

“But running exploration studies means handling large amounts of data, right? Design Manager makes it so easy to quickly browse through designs that you won’t feel limited at all. You can investigate differences and compare different variants of one exploration project or even different projects at once in the same interface. Interactive 3D scene files, synchronized views and interactive tables and plots bring you a new level of interactivity to more deeply analyze your results.”

HEEDS

STAR-CCM+

 

Filed Under: CFD, News Tagged With: Siemens

Water pump design: Geometry optimization for a shrouded impeller

April 7, 2017 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

Bruce Jenkins, Ora Research

For CFD-driven shape optimization of water pumps with shrouded impellers, it’s essential to have an efficient variable-geometry model defined by a set of relevant parameters (design variables). This case-study example focuses on geometry modeling of a typical water pump, with the goal of attaining maximum flexibility in shape variation and fine-tuning.

To begin, the geometry was set up in CAESES (CAE System Empowering Simulation), the software platform from FRIENDSHIP SYSTEMS that helps engineers design optimal flow-exposed products. CAESES provides simulation-ready parametric CAD for complex free-form surfaces, and targets CFD-driven design processes. Its specialized geometry models are ideally suited to automated design exploration and shape optimization.

The animations shown below were generated in CAESES by varying all design variables simultaneously. The geometry variations in these animations are exaggerated to make clearly visible how the shape is being varied; in a real-world use case, the changes that engineers would make to their initial design would likely not be as large.

Meridional contour

The hub and shroud contours, as well as the leading-edge curve, were designed in the Z-X-axis view. Variables were created and connected to these curves—for example, to the control vertices of the B-spline curves or to an angle control—so that they could be varied through the automated process of design exploration. The entire shape can also be controlled and adjusted manually based on engineering intuition, if needed.

Variation of meridional contours.

Blade camber and thickness

The camber surface of the blade was generated using a theta function in the (m,theta)-system. The function graph shown above is a 2D curve definition for which additional design variables were created and connected. From this function and from the leading-edge contour in the meridional plane, the camber surface was derived.

Theta function for generating camber surface.

Next a user-defined thickness distribution was applied normal to the generated camber surface. To control the shape, additional design variables were introduced to change the leading-edge region to be more elliptical than circular, and to vary thickness from leading edge to trailing edge. In addition, the thickness could be varied in the radial direction—that is, while sweeping from hub to shroud.

Variation of impeller blade.

Boolean operations and filleting

After the blade surface was generated, it was combined with the hub and shroud surfaces. CAESES’ Boolean operations were used to merge these geometries. Fillets were created at the intersection of the blade and the remaining geometry. The model shown above has two fillets: one between blade and hub, and another between blade and shroud. Below is an animation from the top view of the final impeller:

Water pump variation (top view).

And a final view, zoomed in:

Water pump variation (zoom).

Friendship Systems CAESES
www.caeses.com

Filed Under: CFD, General Blogs, Simulation Software Tagged With: Friendship Systems Cases

CFD for Solid Edge

December 19, 2016 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

Mentor Graphics FloEFD is an embedded computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solution for Solid Edge software from Siemens. Users can simulate fluid flow in their design process. When used during the design process, it can reduce overall time to a solution by as much a 65%-75%.

FloEFD CFD solution automates many CFD steps, which include transferring model geometry to the CFD application, modeling internal cavities if needed and creating a “mesh.” The CFD technology takes the geometry directly from the CAD application, automatically performs the necessary translations and cavity modeling, and generates an optimized mesh before executing analysis. This approach provides accurate analysis results quickly thus enabling designers to validate designs early and often. It also allows the designer to explore a succession of ideas without risking project deadlines.

Key features include:

–Robust 3D fluid flow and heat transfer analysis software capable of solving complex real-life engineering problems.

–The ability to conduct multiple design studies and evaluate how the modifications influence the design performance immediately.

–An intuitive user interface with built-in intelligent automation including real-time feedback and timely outputs that can be generated quickly in Microsoft Word and Excel.

–Parametric study to compare a range of project variations.

–Fast, automated SmartCell meshing technology to create realistic simulations for complex 3D models including rotating equipment and transient flow behaviors, speeding-up the overall design process.

Mentor Graphics
Mentor.com

Filed Under: CFD, News

Mentor Graphics announces release of FloEFD computational fluid dynamics product

December 17, 2015 By Andrew Zistler Leave a Comment

Mentor Graphics New FloEFD Mesh VisualMentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) today announced the latest release of its leading general purpose, front-loading computational fluid dynamics (CFD) FloEFD solution offering greater accuracy and user productivity. Updated features in this new version include improved mesh handling, an enhanced transient solver, a robust EDA interface, and an interface to Abaqus Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software for stress analysis. Engineers and specialists in the automotive, aerospace and electronics markets will directly benefit from the improved accuracy and productivity.

The latest version of the FloEFD product offers new capabilities for minimizing user time and effort spent on meshing. The FloEFD tool can automatically fill gaps of specified size to quickly make the model watertight, thereby eliminating the time and necessity to adjust the original geometry. The new equidistant refinement capability lets users build multilevel uniform meshes around the body or surface of the model with just one click. And the mesh preview visualization tool helps users achieve the desired mesh with ease and speed.

The new FloEFD product release also features the following:

• A highly improved transient solver allows for faster solution of transient applications as well as higher accuracy for pressure-dominated tasks such as calculating filling/evacuating of a tank or water hammer thereby increasing range of realistic situations that can be modeled.

• A powerful electronic design automation (EDA) interface can help users avoid creating PCBs manually. Users can now import geometric EDA data including copper traces and vias. The interface supports the Mentor Graphics Xpedition® (CC or CCE), IDF and OCB++ PCB design data formats.

• The refractive index depending on wavelength and temperature offers higher accuracy of light and radiation analysis in case materials with complex spectral characteristics are utilized e.g. in automotive lighting industry.

• The ability to visualize rays used for precise radiation modelling allows the user to better understand the impact of the sources on the system, thus helping to find the reason of overheating and suggest the solution faster.

• An engineering task usually requires views from different angles. To support multi-disciplinary analysis, the FloEFD tool can now export pressure and thermal loads to Abaqus for further stress analysis.

• The Calculation Manager displays all projects currently running and those in the queue, thus allowing users to get a better idea as to where their projects stand and to easily control all calculations running at the moment.

The FloEFD product is available as a stand-alone and/or a CAD-embedded tool supporting popular MCAD platforms including Creo, CATIA V5, and Siemens NX.

Mentor Graphics
mentor.com

Filed Under: CAD Industry News, CFD, Simulation Software Tagged With: mentorgraphics

Mentor Graphics announces new FloTHERM product

November 12, 2015 By Patrick Curran Leave a Comment

Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) announce the newest version of its FloTHERM® product. The FloTHERM product was developed to quickly identify potential thermal issues early in the design process to avoid expensive late stage re-design and warranty costs arising from thermal failures in the field. The newest version of the FloTHERM product delivers an automated method to calibrate simulation models to match transient thermal measurements recorded with the Mentor Graphics® T3Ster® hardware. As a result, the FloTHERM product can help maximize simulation data accuracy and provide additional insight into product reliability – a necessity for the automotive, aerospace and electronics products industries.

Mentor Graphics T3Ster product is an advanced thermal tester for thermal characterization of IC packages, LEDs and systems which produces extensive thermal characteristics rapidly. The industry-leading T3Ster test system delivers highly accurate, real-time measurements of heating and cooling transients based on its advanced implementation of the JEDEC static test method (JESD51-1) and can now be considered to be 10X better than alternative solutions.

Mentor-Graphics-FloTHERM-with-Auto-Calibration

The new FloTHERM product can convert a simulated transient thermal response into a structure function curve using the same mathematical process utilized by the T3Ster product. These structure function curves are known to correlate with the physical structure of the device, and are thus the ideal platform to compare simulation with test data. Differences between the structure functions indicate that some aspect of the simulation model is incorrect; typically dimensions or physical properties that are difficult to measure directly such as thermal interface material (TIM) thicknesses or interfacial thermal contact resistances. The new FloTHERM version uses optimization methods to change the model inputs and drive the simulation structure function towards the experimental structure function until a match is achieved. This match indicates that the FloTHERM model is fully calibrated and will respond correctly and accurately in any transient application. Package manufacturers can now certify supply chain models, by providing evidence about the thermal performance of the component in customer applications along with the model itself.

Additional features in the new FloTHERM product include:
• Joule heating – DC electrical calculations are now supported for joule heating effects to be accurately predicted, enabling power distribution net analysis and bus bar design to be performed.

• FloMCAD Bridge enhancement – 64-bit support enables larger MCAD designs to be imported into the FloTHERM product. In addition, the voxelization method used to translate MCAD geometry into analysis objects was re-engineered to be 20 times faster and much smarter, ensuring that coincident faces on different bodies maintain that connection after translation.

• Localized grid spaces – overlapping localized spaces can now be created. The FloTHERM product makes it easy to construct an efficient grid for large cluttered geometry because the arrangement of localized grid spaces is no longer a concern.

• DCIM Software Development Kit – The kit includes everything a DCIM supplier needs to drive FloTHERM, capture the simulation results, and display them within their DCIM software suite. “Mentor Graphics’ DCIM Software Development Kit provides all the hooks DCIM firms like us need to integrate FloTHERM with software such as FieldView 2015™ with ease. This enables us to drive FloTHERM from within our software suite and display the results, including the way shown in the Excel-based example” added Dr. Fredrick Dirla, Jr, CEO of Fieldview Solutions. “I applaud Mentor for democratizing CFD for data center simulation and eliminating guess-work.”

Mentor Graphics Corporation
www.mentor.com/products/mechanical/flotherm/

Filed Under: CFD Tagged With: mentorgraphics

Using simulation to guide product design

December 10, 2014 By Barb Schmitz Leave a Comment

by Barb Schmitz, Senior Editor

Products vary in size, shape, complexity, and usage so it’s hard to generalize anything about product design. The processes by which companies create new products, however, are typically the same. First they define what the product will do (product specifications), and then they capture all of the things that will define the product (design intent).

Once that has been agreed upon, the design team creates detailed designs and tests these burgeoning product ideas to see if they actually behave in the real world the way in which they are designed. When or if they don’t, changes are made to the design and they are tested again. This testing was once conducted using physical prototypes, which is both costly and time-consuming to conduct.

Today this process is very different and more efficient, thanks to virtual testing using simulation software. Digital models are now put through their paces in virtual prototyping environments using simulation software, such as finite element analysis (FEA) or computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Often later in the cycle, physical prototyping testing is used to confirm the simulation results so product designs can be moved onto manufacturing.

Simulation speeds up decision-making
Every step of the product development process is littered with questions, most of which can be answered in multiple ways. How big should it be? How strong does it need to be? Can we reduce its weight? If we reduce its weight or use less material, will it affect its strength? Can we use a different material? Answering these questions as accurately and quickly as possible has a direct impact on both the cost and speed of product development.

After all, engineering is all about asking many questions, making mistakes, changing things, and on and on until you arrive at an optimum solution or design. Calculations, prototypes, and analysis are all tools that provide guidance to engineers as the design moves through the design cycle. Most product geometries are too complex for hand calculations and physical prototypes are costly and built too late in the cycle to be used to optimize designs upfront.

Simulation has emerged as the best way to do all of that quickly and at least cost—both in terms of actual cost and time to market. Originally conducted later in the design process, there is abundant evidence that suggests that products should be simulated throughout the design process. In fact, most agree that simulation should start at the very beginning of the design cycle, during concept development, to quickly vet the ideas being considered and put designs on the best path.

How analysis is used in product design
The shift from simulation tools being used for product validation to an essential part of upfront design requires a paradigm shift involving changed processes, new tools and new ways of thinking for engineers.

Engineers are increasingly turning to simulation early in the design cycle, during concept development. At this stage of design, the product geometry is basic so multiple iterations using simulation can be done quickly so product designers can quickly answer ‘what if’ iterations and move forward with the best design alternative.

“With product design, it’s important to get off to a very good start,” said Bernt Nilsson, senior vice president of Marketing at COMSOL. “When you’re implementing simulation, you want to start in the very early stages, or conceptual design phase. At this stage, when you want to get a basic proof of concept going, you want very simple models. That means you’re using very basic geometry, avoiding including too many details that would slow down the analysis.”

Having some level of integration between CAD and analysis enables engineers to test ideas, adjust designs, explore, and verify to confirm that designs are on the right track, minimizing the risk of flawed designs moving forward when changes are most costly. In other words, design-integrated analysis enables design teams to explore more design variants in less time.

Who should be using simulation tools?
The reality is that simulation tools are as a whole being underutilized at most companies. Possibly the problem is more cultural, than technological. Many engineering managers have not mandated or allowed a process change that leverages simulation. In addition, the question as to who should be using these tools continues to be debated.

Mentor-Graphics-FloEFD-software
Mentor Graphics’ FloEFD software provides a unique range of capabilities required for challenging lighting applications and types of lighting, including LEDs.

A recent CIMdata report cites complexity as one of the underlying issues preventing more widespread adoption. To make simulation software easier to use, several vendors developed simulation packages that are directly integrated with CAD systems. By and large, however, these CAD-integrated simulation software were also not widely embraced by the industry.

Many believe this is due to the fact that not many engineers and product designers–for whom these products were developed–understand the underlying fundamentals of simulation. According to the CIMdata report, “democratization is about simplifying the application of the tools and making them more widely available. It is not for these powerful tools to be used by those who do not understand the product and engineering issues.”

Mentor-Graphics-FloTHERM-XT
By making it easier and faster to mesh complicated shapes and geometries, Mentor Graphics’ FloTHERM XT software democratizes the use of thermal simulation.

Many vendors maintain that only simulation or R&D experts should use simulation tools; that these tools should not be “dumbed down” for engineers to use. Others maintain that simulation will not meet its potential in terms of benefits to the design process until it is widely embraced by design engineers.

Simulation tools are typically offered as standalone software or as CAD-integrated software. With the latter, the simulation tool is launched directly from within the CAD environment, the simulation uses native CAD geometry, and many of the pain-provoking steps of traditional simulation—such as meshing—has been automated. There are benefits to both approaches.

“Fully integrating simulation capabilities within the native design environment of mechanical design engineers provides them easy and direct access to the benefits of up-front simulation throughout their design stages,” said Robin Bornoff, PhD, Market Development Manager, Mentor Graphics Mechanical Analysis Division. “Whether it’s Creo, CATIA V5 or Siemens NX, being able to simulate a design without suffering the pain of data interoperability with standalone simulation tools puts simulation directly under their control.”

Several CAD vendors, such as SolidWorks, contend that simulation tools should be embedded in the CAD software to best enable engineers to leverage their use. “Nowadays, all product engineers can leverage their mechanical engineering knowledge to design better products using 3D CAD and simulation tools,” said Delphine Genouvrier, Senior Product Portfolio Manager, SolidWorks Simulation. “With CAD-embedded simulation, every engineer involved in product development can apply corrective action on the design that is triggered by the insights provided by the simulation results.”

SolidWorks-CAD-software
By tightly integrating SolidWorks CAD software with powerful simulation capabilities, users can test against a broad range of parameters during the design process, such as durability, static and dynamic response, assembly motion, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and plastics injection molding.

Other vendors have focused on automating functions within their software that enable engineers and product designers to use simulation tools without having the domain expertise of experts. “CFD simulation has historically required knowledge of the underlying algorithms to be able to select appropriate options for a given application,” said Bornoff. “Automating such choices liberates the design engineer from this pre-requisite, allowing them to focus on their given design challenge and not the numeric of the tool employed.”

Bridging the gap: how engineers and analysts can work together
Some highly complex design scenarios require specialized tools, such as multiphysics simulation software, which typically requires the expertise of R&D and simulation specialists. This, however, doesn’t mean that simulation results are not of use to product designers and engineers. High-end simulation developers have worked hard to create capabilities that facilitate this interaction between the simulation specialists and the product engineers. Providing better ways for these two groups to collaborate enables the design process to be iterative and benefit from insights provided by simulation results.

“You have this interaction between the simulation expert and the design engineers so you need tools that support that collaboration. We’ve invested a lot into making it easier to combine COMSOL with CAD, because it’s crucial to get that right,” said Nilsson. “Our LiveLink products enable you to take a large CAD assembly and combine or link it with your simulation in COMSOL. You have this bidirectional link so when you make a change to the CAD geometry, it is automatically updated in COMSOL.”

COMSOL-model-of-an-air-filled-shell
This COMSOL model of an air-filled shell and tube heat exchanger shows water flowing through the inner tubes. Simulation results reveal flow velocity, temperature distribution, and pressure within the vessel.

When CAD-embedded simulation tools are being deployed, the interaction between the engineers and the specialist looks slightly different. Engineers deploy the simulation tool for optimization of design concepts and analysts use the tool later to do final validation.

“Product engineers can detect early potential product issues, improper behavior and compare their design ideas with ‘what if’ scenarios,” said Genouvrier. “So when the analyst receives the product later in the process, it has already been optimized and tested for product performance so they can then focus on final validation or complex simulations, using their expertise in advanced analysis rather than doing product optimization. This is a win-win situation for the entire company.”

The reality is that at each company, simulation experts are small in number compared to the number of engineers so careful consideration must be made in terms of how to make best use of their time.

“Analyst experts are few and far between in the context of the number of design iterations that are considered during the design process,” said Bornoff. “The question is how best to utilize their competence. ‘Turning the handle’ to simulate each design iteration can and should be done by the designer. When a problem is identified, then that is the time to involve the analyst. Not because they have experience in using an ‘advanced’ simulation package, but because they have the domain expertise to be able to identify and recommend a remedial design solution.”

CAD-embedded-CFD
By using CAD-embedded CFD, engineers can optimize the proposed design immediately and inside their preferred CAD environment. They compare configuration and parametric study capability inside FloEFD for Creo enables engineers to understand the influence of a variety of changes in the geometry or boundary conditions on the results without leaving the Creo tool.

Design culture must adapt to maximize benefits
In order to truly maximize their investment in analysis tools, companies need to stop propagating the idea that simulation can’t drive design; it can only validate them. Without a process change, designs being validated digitally are the ones that would have been validated through physical prototyping. So where’s the value add?

Better user training is also in order. Users need to better understand what simulation results are telling them, either about the design or about the quality of the simulation. Additional training on input properties, material properties and failure mechanisms will empower them to make better decisions and look further to find the optimal configuration

Whether simulation tools are being used by specialists or by product engineers—or both—simulation holds the key to reduced physical prototyping, higher-quality, more optimized products, and faster design cycles. The key being that design optimization must happen early in the design cycle when changes can still be made without significant rework, lost cycle time or significant expense.

Reprint info >>

COMSOL
www.comsol.com

SolidWorks
www.solidworks.com

Mentor Graphics
www.mentor.com

Filed Under: CAE, CAM, CFD

Autodesk Ships Nastran 2015, Nastran In-CAD 2015

August 12, 2014 By Barb Schmitz Leave a Comment

There’s been a big push by simulation software vendors to get engineers and designers to start incorporating analysis tools into their product development processes. High-end simulation tools have traditionally been used by specialists or analysts who’s jobs are to run design geometry–created by engineers–through their paces using analysis tools to validate that designs will be structurally sound and will operate as intended once built.

The motive is obvious. There are many more design engineers than there are analysts so making their products more engineering-centric opens up much bigger potential markets for simulation vendors. There are also, however, many compelling reasons for engineers to use analysis tools early in the design process. Doing so speeds up development, cuts time to market, and helps them identify potential design flaws long before costly physical prototypes are built.

Autodesk Nastran is an industry-recognized FEA solver for analyzing linear and nonlinear stress, dynamics and heat transfer characteristics of structures and mechanical components.
Autodesk Nastran is an industry-recognized FEA solver for analyzing linear and nonlinear stress, dynamics and heat transfer characteristics of structures and mechanical components.

New versions of Nastran solver released

One of these high-end tools is Nastran, finite-element analysis (FEA) software now sold by Autodesk after its acquisition of NEi Software back in May. The goal of the acquisition was to expand the company’s structural analysis capabilities, and it follows similar strategic technology acquisitions in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD), plastics and composites solutions spaces.

Autodesk Nastran offers an industry-recognized FEA solver for analyzing linear and nonlinear stress, dynamics and heat transfer characteristics of structures and mechanical components. Nastran provides real-time results and changes in solution parameters while solving, which helps engineers and analysts gain accurate results to complex simulations.

Autodesk Nastran In-CAD 2015 is a CAD-embedded, general-purpose FEA tool powered by the Autodesk Nastran solver. The new Nastran In-CAD offers a wide range of simulation spanning across multiple analysis types, delivering another high-end simulation in a CAD-embedded workflow. The software works within both Autodesk Inventor and SolidWorks 3D CAD software systems.

Taking FEA to the Cloud

Autodesk Nastran Solver is available to customers using the Autodesk Simulation Mechanical and Autodesk Simulation Flex product offerings. Autodesk Simulation Flex, formerly Autodesk Sim 360 Pro with Local Solve, consists of:

* Autodesk Simulation Mechanical with cloud-enabled FEA tools for static stress, linear dynamic analysis and mechanical event simulations;
* Autodesk Simulation CFD Motion including Design Study environment and 3D CAD connectors with cloud-enabled CFD tools for fluid flow and thermal simulations; and
* Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis with cloud-enabled simulation for detailed analysis and code checking on a range of structures, including buildings and frame structures.

“We’ve been working with Autodesk tools since the acquisition of Algor and CFDesign and have seen first-hand how incredibly powerful the combination of strong numerical solvers and Autodesk’s advanced visualization, cloud and user interface tools can be,” said Dmitriy Tseliakhovich, Co-founder, CEO and CTO at Escape Dynamics. “Nastran is a great solver with very powerful non-linear and dynamic simulation capabilities so its integration with Autodesk’s front end and elastic cloud computing platform is extremely exciting.”

Autodesk Nastran and Autodesk Nastran In-CAD are now available. For more details about both products and licensing and pricing options, click here.

Barb Schmitz

Filed Under: Autodesk, CAE, CFD, News Tagged With: Autodesk, CFD, FEA, Inventor, SolidWorks

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