Faster, Better Computational Fluid Dynamics

Dear DE Reader:

Updating mission-critical software can be a Hamletian moment: The pale cast of thought about what lies in that undiscover’d country can give you pause. Often, the problem lies in the wont of many developers to produce four gazillion pages of release notes. Those things are great for the real geeks and as a reference, but they’re as sleepy a read for most hands-on engineers as a credit card agreement. Today’s Check it Out paper sets an example for how mere mortals can learn about what’s new and important in a major software update without being bored to inaction by minutia.

The application brief “Faster, Better Computational Fluid Dynamics” covers the chief enhancements in v17 of the ANSYS Fluent tool for CFD and multiphysics applications as well as the ANSYS CFD comprehensive solution set. Also making major appearances are ANSYS CFX, which is particularly suited for rotating machinery jobs, and ANSYS SpaceClaim 3D modeling software many engineers use to create, edit and repair geometry.

This six-page PDF presents fast, technically meaty summaries of the key stuff you’ll want to know about v17’s new CFD features. Sample screenshots depict what you can expect from many of the new capabilities, and graphs show you some of the possible performance gains.

Speed and ease of use are overriding themes, and they are detailed with graspable specifics. For example, there’s a discussion of the software’s updated user interface and its new mesh morpher/optimizer constraint setup feature. Here, you’ll learn of an 80-million-cell study that had more than 1960 boundary zones. It saw the time to select all zones and set constraints drop from 15 minutes to two seconds with v17.

Specific areas that this paper zones in on include geometry and preprocessing, faster solving of lower-quality meshes, HPC (high-performance computing) scalability and data exporting. As you might imagine, meshing enhancements received a lot of attention in v17. Mesh-only topics covered include scripted automatic meshing, native polyhedral meshes and region-based volume meshing. Additionally, the paper introduces an “initial capability” in v17 called Overset Meshing for problems in which geometric components are moving in relation to one another.

The takeaway is that “Faster, Better Computational Fluid Dynamics” has the data you need to make an informed decision about upgrading your CFD toolsets to ANSYS v17. Hit today’s Check it Out link to get your copy. Well worth it.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, DE