Automatic Interface Creation in ANSYS Discovery 2024 R1

Title: Automatic interface creation in Ansys Discovery 2024 R1 Hello, this is Mark Dortman with Ozen Engineering.

Today I'd like to talk to you about a new feature in ANSYS Discovery 2024 R 1. This new feature really got me excited, and we need to talk about this feature a lot because it helps definitely save a lot of time, particularly for conjugate heat transfer problems.

In conjugate heat transfer problems, you have a certain number of solids, typically a fluid surrounding the domain, and you have all these interfaces between the solids within themselves, between different components of solids, and also interfaces between each of these solids to the fluid domain.

So, as you can imagine, these all need to be tagged and separated cleanly in pre-processing for conjugate CFD analysis. Also, we use a shared topology type approach in ANSYS to ensure that the mesh goes through one to one across these interfaces.

So, as you realize, it's pretty important to get a proper solution. Now, let me show you what ANSYS Discovery does that makes this very easy. Let's consider an electronics cooling problem.

So right now, we're seeing our air domain surrounding the inside the enclosure surrounding these electronics components. Let me hide it where we have a board. Then we can see the air. So let's assign it air.

We have our die component, which generates heat, and we have a heat sink to dissipate the heat away. And typically, you know, when you have some solids, you know, you'll not have these different parts, edges imprinted on each other. Let's, for example, take a look at the heat sink.

So this is, you know, if we go back, double click, go back to the, you know, the heat sink. And then we go back to select. And so if we click on this surface, on this surface, it really needs to be split into two for a conjugate heat transfer. Why? Because we have a die sitting on this face.

So there should be an interface between die and the heat sink, and the orange volume that should be a separate surface that actually interfaces with the fluid. And again, we have the same issue with the board and die interface where the surface needs to be split into two.

So, what Discovery brings in is automatically detecting these issues and splitting the domains, splitting the surfaces, and then making the right interface connections all automatically without the use of thinking about it. So let me show you how. So let's go turn on our components.

Let's go to simulation. And what I would like to do is a fluid flow. So I'm going to pick flow. I'm going to pick this face as an inlet and put five meters per second. And then, because it's a conjugate model, let's assign a temperature to it. So next step is, let's pick our outlet.

Let's put a zero pressure outlet and hit checkmark. And now we have our flow outlet. And next step is now we need to define some thermal boundary conditions, which will turn the solids on. As you notice right now, you know, the solid components are not included in the physics.

So let's go solid thermal. Let's hide our volume. Heat sink. Let's pick our die and put some, you know, heat, a volumetric heat generation, and it added this solid heat here. So that's great. Now, what has happened is ANSYS Discovery has automatically added these connections for us.

See under the connections, we see bonded contacts between solids. So let's zoom into the area and go here, highlight them. It's those two surfaces that are now actually extracted from that one single surface and treated as a bonded contact.

And then again, we have all the fluid interfaces and three different solid interfaces captured in these purple elements. So all the work for us is actually automatically done by ANSYS Discovery, which is a very great feature.

And if you, for example, have maybe tens or hundreds of these solid objects and with a click of a button, you know, all these interfaces will be automatically done.