ANSYS 14 Release Highlights
ANSYS 14.0 provides a great number of new and advanced features that deliver solutions for customers to amplify engineering, simulate their most complex engineered products, and drive innovation with high-performance computing (HPC).
The many new features in ANSYS 14.0 deliver additional physics depth and breadth that can be scaled to meet the changing needs of customers. The advances have been developed with guidance from our most innovative customers, delivering a comprehensive solution for Simulation Driven Product Development™.
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Workflow Performance & Usability
Simulating a single operating condition provides performance information, but engineers gain more design insight by simulating the entire performance envelope. ANSYS Workbench provides a framework for design exploration and optimization by enabling parametric modeling of geometric configurations, mesh controls, material properties, and operating conditions, leading to an automated simulation process. ANSYS 14.0 allows design point updates to be submitted for simultaneous execution via the remote solve manager (RSM), including cluster computing environments.
Geometry Modeling & Interoperability for Simulation
Modeling operations in ANSYS DesignModeler now directly accept geometry entities (like faces, edges and vertices), in addition to supporting named selections and sketches. In ANSYS 14.0, all features and tools are available for customization and exposure via toolbars to help users customize the interface with frequently used features, along with tools for easy and direct access. Several hot keys enable frequently repeated operations, reducing the number of steps for a given task. Other related improvements in ANSYS 14.0 include automatic freeze during slice, better error handling, easy toggle between single and box select options, and visualization controls for edge direction and vertices to identify and fix topological issues.
ANSYS EKM Product Installation & Setup
ANSYS EKM 14.0 brings new capabilities with important changes to simplify installation and licensing with EKM Individual and EKM Shared products.
- The EKM Individual setup allows an EKM server to be set up for an individual user on his own machine. A user can access the private repository on an individual server, as well as have access to the full capabilities of EKM.
- The EKM Shared setup allows an EKM server to be set up on a shared device that can be accessed by multiple users in a collaborative mode. Multiple users can access a shared repository via LAN or across a WAN.
CFD Meshing Automation
CAD models often contain many parts, gaps or contact between parts. The larger the number of parts, contacts and gaps, the dirtier the geometry is. CFD engineers are responsible for cleaning geometry from a CAD file to extract the fluid volume and create the mesh: This is often cumbersome and time consuming. In ANSYS 14.0, the assembly meshing tool automatically extracts the fluid volume from CAD assemblies. Furthermore, it automatically creates either cut-cell structured Cartesian meshes (hexahedral mesh elements) or unstructured tetrahedral meshes (cut-tet), depending on user goals and preferences.
The cut-cell technique provides a smaller number of cells and is ideal when high-quality cells are required away from walls or boundaries. The cut-tet technique is ideal when high-quality mesh elements are required in regions close to walls. Inflation layers are supported for both meshing techniques to allow accurate resolution of regions of large gradients (for example, shear layers and boundary layers). Using the assembly meshing tool, users who once spent a considerable amount of time on analysis pre-processing — geometry cleaning, fluid volume extraction and volume decomposition to create hexa/tetrahedral hybrid meshes — can now get meshes of high quality in an automated, robust and fast manner.
Parametric Modeling and Design Optimization
The adjoint solver of ANSYS Fluent allows engineers to compute the derivative of engineering quantities of interest (such as drag, lift and pressure drop) with respect to the shape of the geometry and other design parameters. This provides guidance on how best to modify the design to achieve an improvement in performance and robustness. It also provides a rapid quantitative estimate of the improvement that can be expected for an extensive range of design-change scenarios. The power of adjoint technology is the ability to gain far more insight using a single simulation than previously possible. Tight integration with Fluent ensures that reliable and consistent design sensitivities are computed.
Electronics Cooling Workflow & Usability
ANSYS Icepak 14.0 contains a new graphical user interface with new icons, redesigned menus and dialog boxes, expanded right-click functionality, enhanced graphics, and many additional productivity enhancements. Improvements to ANSYS DesignModeler enable engineers to rapidly simplify and create Icepak objects from mechanical CAD data. New variables in ANSYS CFD-Post (thermal chokepoint and thermal cross) allow engineers to identify areas with high thermal resistances and possible regions for a new heat flow path.
Automotive Modeling
The ANSYS Workbench IC engine analysis system compresses setup time by automating steps in geometry setup, meshing, mesh motion, cold flow setup and post-processing. Improvements that allow the boundary layer to be included during dynamic remeshing enable users to better capture wall effects and improve mesh quality.
Two-Way Coupling
Simultaneously leveraging the capabilities of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structural dynamics facilitates high-fidelity analysis of complex multiphysics problems. A well-known example is fluid−structure interaction (FSI). For example, FSI can be the interaction between forces exercised by fluid on a solid structure, leading to deformation of the structure. This deformation can, in turn, influence flow behavior and its impact on the structure. Another example of FSI is the interaction between fluid and structure temperatures: Large differences in temperatures can lead to structural deformation (solid material dilatation or contraction) as well as changes in fluid dynamics (flow dilatation or contraction). ANSYS 14.0 adds two-way FSI capabilities between ANSYS Fluent and ANSYS Mechanical to the multiphysics portfolio for simulating complex phenomena like flutter.
Fluids Solver & HPC Performance
ANSYS is committed to providing solver and HPC enhancements release by release. ANSYS 14.0 features a comprehensive suite including architecture-aware partitioning, improved scalability for simulations with monitors enabled, and the full release of remote solver manager supporting heterogeneous networks. There is also support of automatic marking of bad-quality cells and invocation of more robust numerics on these cells for improved solver robustness and overall accuracy.
Turbomachinery Modeling
The transient blade row methods in ANSYS CFX 14.0 are designed to operate on single blade passages and are targeted at three classes of problems. First, an inlet disturbance can be set up that has a different phase angle than the passage. Second, a moving mesh can be implemented in the blade passage to simulate blade flutter, in which the flutter motion is out of phase with the blade passage. Finally, a full stage (rotor stator) can be simulated with two single blade passages, in which the pitch angles of the passages are different from one another. In all cases, significant savings in computational cost is achieved, as these problems would require a full-wheel mesh to solve without these models. Applications in turbomachinery include multi-stage axial, mixed, and centrifugal compressors, turbines, fans, and pumps.
MAPDL – ANSYS Workbench Integration
ANSYS 14.0 introduces a number of features that allow the user to control various components of the finite element model within the mechanical environment. All connections such as constraint equations, spiders or weak springs can now be visualized. Users can create selections of nodes using selection logic. For example, these selections can be used to apply loads and boundary conditions that can be modified during restart operations.
Composites
Simulation of composites structures brings additional challenges, such as the definition of hundreds or thousands of plies on a structure, including various orientations, or ply-by-ply analysis of the structure’s potential failure. A dedicated tool such as ANSYS Composite PrepPost provides significant ease of use for such models. Release 14.0 tightly integrates Composite PrepPost with other simulation in ANSYS Workbench. Release 14.0 provides specific modeling techniques for analysis of composites failure, such as progressive failure.
ANSYS Composite PrepPost is part of the project page and streamlines data exchange with implicit or explicit solutions. The bicycle (above) is computed using the implicit solver, while the baseball bat (below) is solved with explicit simulation.
External Data Mapping
When results are to be shared between physics, standard practice is to import data, such as pressure fields, temperatures or heat exchange coefficients, from external files. Automated algorithms provide an efficient tool to project the data from one mesh to another. However, some problems can arise in cases of misalignment between the original data and the current mesh, or when the initial data is too scarce. The capabilities introduced at ANSYS release 13.0 have been enhanced to provide users with additional control and correction capabilities in ANSYS 14.0.
Turbomachinery
ANSYS 14.0 introduces the ability to identify critical speeds of single-spool systems with Campbell plots for solid and line bodies within ANSYS Mechanical, therefore allowing Workbench users to take advantage of solver technology in an efficient way.
Campbell diagrams in ANSYS Mechanical diagram show variation of the modes of the structure with velocity and critical speeds identified along with the stability of each mode.
Beams & Shells
ANSYS Mechanical introduces the ability to toggle between pipe and beam formulation of line bodies; it also offers the ability to define pipe-specific loads and results. ANSYS 14.0 supports the latest generation of pipe elements available from the MAPDL solver.
Users can import non-uniform thickness fields in the form of tabulated data using the external data capability. This enables direct import of bodies with variable shell thickness from simulation programs, such as ANSYS Polyflow, and the simulation of complex events, such as a plastic bottle drop test, with variable thickness being dropped when filled with a liquid.
Mesh connections allow users to merge nodes between adjacent faces without requiring geometric changes, to ensure that shared edges are available in the geometric model. This capability enhances the robustness and efficiency of meshing large shell models.
Robust Explicit Solutions
Nodal-based strain (NBS) tet eliminates numerical difficulties encountered in the past when using tet elements in problems that undergo shear that results in elements locking. Hex elements are best suited for use with explicit dynamics. However, complex geometries can be difficult or impossible to mesh with hex elements. The average nodal pressure (ANP) tet, implemented about a decade ago in ANSYS Explicit Dynamics, solves the difficulties of volume locking but not shear locking. Available with ANSYS 14.0, the NBS tet element enables running problems with shear loadings with highly accurate solutions.
Advanced Modeling
ANSYS 14.0 introduces a variety of new materials and enhancements to existing models. Biomedical applications can benefit from enhanced material formulations such as the Holzapfel model to capture behavior of fiber-reinforced tissue or shape-memory alloys for stent modeling.
Moisture diffusion has been implemented in thermal, structural and coupled simulations for electronic components. ANSYS acoustics capabilities for coupled analyses include far-field parameters calculations as well as an enhanced PML formulation. Large deformation simulations benefit from extension of 3-D rezoning capabilities to a number of loads and boundary conditions as well as support of a wider range of nonlinear materials. ANSYS provides the best solution for brake squeal analyses including complex Eigen-methods to predict onset of squeal, new state-of-the-art linear methods and parametric studies.
Numerous advances in material models are available, such as shape memory alloy enhancements for stent analysis (left) and plasticity induced heating as used in friction stir welding operations (right).
Moisture can critically affect electronics components such as PBGAs. Simulation results show moisture diffusion in a PBGA after 160 hours.
HPC for Structures
The computation of large models has become a routine practice for many engineers. Available hardware power is steadily growing and benefits from latest advances such as the GPU board. Engineers who want to take full advantage of hardware must have suitable algorithms available. Once the model has been solved efficiently, reviewing results takes further large resources because of file size and the large amount of I/O. With ANSYS Mechanical 14.0, users can take advantage of the latest generation of GPU boards as well as minimize the amount of I/O required for post-processing operations.
Results courtesy MicroConsult Engineering, GmbH.
Electromagnetics
3-D IC Packages
IC package manufacturers have continued to evolve more complex packaging technologies, such as system-on-chip, stacked die, and multi-chip modules, in an effort to maintain continually increasing chip performance. Three-dimensional packages such as a stacked die, in which multiple dies are stacked vertically in the same package, have unique thermal requirements. Three-dimensional structures don’t spread heat evenly throughout the chip, which creates local hot spots. With ANSYS Icepak 14.0, engineers can simulate thermal response of 3-D stacked dies and package-on-package configurations.
Finite Array Analysis
The analysis of finite-sized antenna arrays is a very important topic in antenna design. Due to the large electrical size of antenna arrays, it has been problematic to simulate with any 3-D simulator. As a result, it is a generally accepted method to solve single antennas and then use a linked boundary approach to create an infinitely large array or utilize an array factor to create a finite array. This method, however, neglects all array edge effects and, therefore, calculates erroneous far-field patterns. The new finite array capability models the finite array exactly; it therefore predicts the proper far fields that include array edge effects.
