Editor’s Pick: ANSYS 12.0 Launched

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

It all comes down to competition in what’s turning out to be a completely new ballgame in these challenging times. Yesterday, new rules governing fuel economy and automobile emissions for all new trucks and cars sold in the US joined the push for alternative energy sources, smart grids,  plug-in cars, maglev trains, and so on. That’s a lot of design and analysis of complex systems, and it needs to be done quickly—2016 for the new emissions and fuel standards announced yesterday. Not only are all of these engineering challenges, they are all multiple-physics challenges. That is why it’s important news that ANSYS 12.0 has come out.

ANSYS Inc. has been at the forefront developing integrated high-level engineering software for years because, simply, we live in a multiple-physics world. Over time, this vision naturally led the company to its ANSYS Workbench platform that integrates multiple-physics disciplines so that you can create complex products and know how they will perform in the real world when subjected to multiple-physics forces.

As the ANSYS CAE center of gravity, Workbench is where design, physics, and data come together so that you can study, prototype, and optimize designs. In version 12.0, ANSYS has enhanced Workbench extensively. The most notable enhancement is the new project schematic functionality in your project page. If you’re familiar with NI’s LabVIEW, you have the basic idea. You use the Workbench schematics to connect systems and, as you do, you build complex analyses of multiple-physics phenomena. But it’s more than that. It’s like a dashboard: It tells you data dependencies and the state of a cell—e.g. the cell is up to date, meshed, needs to be solved, etc.—and you can launch applications to do whatever it is you need to do. (BTW, reading between the lines of the ANSYS literature, I’m pretty sure that we have not seen anything yet when it comes to schematics.)

There are two points here worth considering. The first is that schematics represent a simplified way to get you moving on your project:  At a glance you know where things are at. A big help. The second is that word “simplified,” by which I mean that schematics get the software out of your face so that you can focus on engineering.

And that’s the key to version 12.0. ANSYS does high-level,  professional CAE software—structural mechanics, explicit dynamics, thermal analysis, electromagnetics,  and frequency response and large overall motion of nonlinear, flexible multibody systems. FLUENT CFD is now integrated with the new Workbench environment. None of this is kid stuff, and bringing it all together for multiple-physics analyses is no cakewalk. But the company knows that incredibility powerful does not mean difficult to use. In fact, they know that hard to use slows down development cycles, increases costs, delays new product introduction, and restrains innovation.

ANSYS 12.0 takes another big step toward boundless multiple-physics analysis, which is where you can gain the edge over your competition. There’s a ton to learn about ANSYS 12.0. You can start with the links to videos, webinars, traveling seminars, and all sorts of materials in today’s Pick of the Week write-up. This is one that you really need to check out.

Thanks, Pal.—Lockwood
Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor, at Large, Desktop Engineering Magazine

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