Editor’s Pick: CFD Suite Upgraded

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Software Cradle is one of those quiet companies with a big footprint in the engineering analysis world. Its CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software is especially well deployed in Asian companies like Denso, Honda R&D, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Panasonic, Toshiba and Toyota, and it’s a growing presence elsewhere. It is, for example, a member of the Altair Partner Alliance. (Just for the record: The US division is known as Cradle North America Inc. If you Google that, you get the Software Cradle website. So, we’ll stick with Software Cradle as the North American company name for today.)

Software Cradle recently released version 11 of its flagship CFD system, SC/Tetra. At about the same time, Software Cradle also released version 11 of its scSTREAM thermal-fluid analysis software, its Heat Designer 3D structured mesh thermal-fluid analysis system for electronics cooling and its EOopti optimization engine extension option for all three systems. Let’s take a quick look at these tools. But, first, let me advise you, there’s no way that I can do them justice in so little space.

SC/Tetra finds wide use in industries as diverse as automotive, turbo-machinery and product design for simulation applications as varied as air conditioner ventilation ductwork, chemical vapor deposition, fans, mixed flow pumps, turbines and vehicle aerodynamics. SC/Tetra is a general-purpose, all-in-one (preprocessor, solver and processor) CFD tool. It uses an unstructured mesh—tetrahedron, pentahedron and hexahedron—to calculate geometries, provides both automatic mesh generation and a Wizard-based interface. The developer describes it as the application for thermal-fluid jobs that require precise reproduction of physical geometry. Beyond simulating fluid flow and heat transfer applications, SC/Tetra can calculate things like acoustics, chemical reactions, Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) for moving and/or rotating boundaries, free surfaces and human body thermoregulation (JOS).

SC/Tetra Version 11 has a new liquid film model that, along with its existing particle tracking function, helps you simulate droplets spattering to a wall and turning into a liquid film. It also has a new Moving Arrows function for visualizing 3D flow patterns. The arrows literally move about your object of interest, providing you insight at the slightest glance. Other new functions in Version 11 include de-noising, a new piston analysis function with improved mesh deformation and an evaporation function of free surface calculation (VOF–volume of fluid).

Software Cradle’s scSTREAM and Heat Designer applications are near twins. scSTREAM is a general-purpose structured grid (Cartesian or cylindrical) CFD tool. It’s tailored for tasks that do not require precise reproductions of fine geometrical curvature to predict flow structures accurately, such as many jobs in electronics, HVAC design, civil engineering and product design. It uses the finite volume method, and the developer says it can solve a one million mesh model using less than 300 MB of memory. Heat Designer is scSTREAM specialized for the thermal design of electronics and for users with little or no experience with computational thermal analysis.

ElectronicPartsMaker is a nifty sounding utility new to scSTREAM and Heat Designer Version 11. It’s described as letting you create a model of SOP (small outline package) or QFP (quad flat package) and then save it as a library file. Also new is a cut-cell solver for flow analysis that simulates curved objects while using a structured grid. Version 11 also now has that Moving Arrows feature for visualizing 3D flow patterns.

The EOopti optimization engine option for all three systems has something called MOGA (Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm) technology. Version 11 is said to offer improved accuracy of response surface with the introduction of EGO (Efficient Global Optimization) technology. EGO makes accuracy better by adding sampling points where the expected improvement or RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) indicator becomes the maximum.

And I’m running out of space. You can learn a lot more about Version 11 of SC/Tetra, scSTREAM, Heat Designer and EOopti from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. Links at the end will take you to the major solutions and a number of application examples. Sign ups for webinars and seminars are linked as well.

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s pick of the week write-up.

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