ANSYS ICEM CFD has been using the Workbench CAD readers for a few years now, and for those of you using ICEM CFD in Workbench, it is drag and drop simple. But many of our stand alone ANSYS ICEM CFD … Continue reading
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Contact technology is used extensively throughout ANSYS Mechanical and Mechanical APDL to enforce compatible behavior between different portions within a model. With each Release, ANSYS continues to improve the breadth and robustness of our contact technology. In ANSYS 15.0, we … Continue reading
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When I first got introduced to composites as a student (many years ago!), I remember having felt amazed at how powerful yet complex materials they are. In a recent interview published in Composites in Manufacturing, my colleague Marc Wintermantel expressed … Continue reading
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In a previous blog, I discussed how the “5-box trick” can be used to visually represent the steps in an ANSYS nCode DesignLife fatigue simulation. In this blog I will discuss the “Load Mapping” box in more detail. FE analyses … Continue reading
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Whether you are an experienced user or beginning with our tools, or even looking to know what ANSYS tools can do for you, you can benefit from great videos that are available on YouTube. I am amazed at the quality … Continue reading
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Have you ever wanted to break up a model in multiple different zones and then mesh each with the best method possible? What if that could be done automatically? And of course, all the zones should be mesh-conformal, and all the … Continue reading
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Diffusion is the process by which subject is transported from one part of a system to another as a result of random molecular motions, which is analogues to transfer of heat by conduction. Examples of diffusion are, but not limited to, … Continue reading
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Piezoelectric devices surround us in our everyday life. Our cars and trucks contain many piezoelectric devices, including fuel level sensors, air bag deployment sensors, parking sensors and piezoelectric generators in the wheels to power the tire pressure monitoring system. Your … Continue reading
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Are you a new user of ANSYS software interested in expanding your scope of expertise? Or are you an experienced user who wants to understand the best techniques to tackle a complex new application? Do you wish you had access … Continue reading
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ANSYS Workbench was designed to be a parametric and persistent platform so that you could easily perform design studies and really get into simulation driven product development. Tools like DX can help you drive those parameters, but first, you need … Continue reading
The post How to Create ANSYS Workbench Parameters and Named Selections with NX appeared first on ANSYS Blog.
In previous posts, we showed you how to parameterize DesignModeler, Spaceclaim and Creo Parametric. Very recently, we had for for creating Named Selections and Parameters in NX. Today, we finally get to one for Catia. I don’t have Catia installed on … Continue reading
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In a previous post, I have presented how to apply a harmonic base excitation in ANSYS Mechanical 15.0 using three different techniques. Among those techniques, we had the great ACT extension that has received a great attention due to its … Continue reading
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“Meshing”… Usually throwing this single word to a group of structural or CFD analysts will start interesting and passionate discussions. Meshing is definitely a key part of the simulation process and requires attention. As analysts, how many hours did we or do we spend on meshing? Probably too many — especially if you have been in the simulation world for many years and started when automation of meshing was not so common. But after all, meshing is just one of the tools that we need to get accurate results and we should spend more time looking at simulation results than meshing our models.
Automated meshing is highly desirable when it comes to reduce simulation times and compress design cycles. But automation may not be so easy and analysts tend to want to have control on what is happening. ANSYS 16.0 adds new meshing tools and enhances existing ones in the Workbench environment that help reconcile both the need for automation and the need for control.
Watching our latest videos on meshing is time well spent. They walk you through automated defeaturing of geometry that leads to a reduced element count by removing the small details you don’t need. This can be achieved by means of virtual topology,. which helps group small surfaces into larger ones so unnecessary geometric details are skipped.
Another way to achieve defeaturing is to use size-based rules during the meshing process. For the latter method, a simple specification of the size of the details to be removed is enough and the mesher takes care of skipping such details while retaining the overall geometry of the model.
Sometimes you want to locally modify an element shape. In those cases, it’s very likely you have controlled the element quality. ANSYS 16.0 helps you display the quality of your mesh directly on the model. Then you can grab a node and move it around, until the element quality reaches the level you need.
Another useful capability is the node merge capability that allows you to take two different parts and join their meshes.
Of course, all our advances are based on our core meshing technologies for tet, hex or shell meshing. And leveraging the parallel meshing technology makes the most of the cores you have on your local machine, providing you with a mesh in much less time!
The post CFD and Structural Meshing: Who Moved My Node? appeared first on ANSYS Blog.
We occasionally get questions about writing if/else parameter expressions. For instance, users may be setting up a parametric model where the heat turns on only under certain conditions or perhaps an input or output is best expressed as a step function.
Yes, you can do this with expressions. Lets look at some basic examples.
In this first case, we create an expression for P3 to specify one of two possible hole radii based on the offset spacing — note the unit conversion.
Be very careful with the units. Not putting them into the expression correctly will result in an error message.
You may want to make a more complex series of if/else statements. The Expression field does not accept semicolons (used to separate lines), but you can make a longer “if else” statement. Use this approach to define an input that varies in steps based on some other parameters. In this case, I am specifying that my number of holes must be “fibonacci”. A more realistic example may have to do with manufacturable dimensions or costs that increase in steps.
Note that the format is “value if argument else another-value if argument … else default-value.”
Of course, you could also do this with output parameters. In this case, I created a new output parameter and set the expression to create a string, Yes or No.
We are interested in hearing how you have applied if/else expressions, please let us know in the comments section.
Here are some sample if/else expressions:
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ANSYS Workbench’s Project Schematic does a great job serving as a canvas for engineers to compose their simulation workflows. Depending on your simulation process, you may want to capture your workflows and abstract them one step further. Starting with ANSYS 16.0 you can abstract the simulation process by leveraging new ANSYS ACT functionality. With ANSYS ACT Wizards you can capture your company’s or industry’s simulation techniques and deploy them in a simple, easy-to-use app for engineers, designers, and analysts.
I’ve worked on several customer projects where industry or company-specific “best practices” must drive simulations. Users seek making general-purpose, off-the-shelf ANSYS products more application-specific by adapting to these methods. This is where ANSYS ACT fills the gap — enabling users to Integrate, extend, automate, and streamline within the ANSYS portfolio.
Let’s focus on ANSYS ACT Wizards — a new way to guide your simulation.
Built on simple file formats such as XML and Python, you can define distinct simulation steps to set up, solve, and review your complex simulations. Each step provides navigation, status, input, and custom controls to help assist your engineers, designers, and analysts.
Consider a simple first step in your simulation process – selecting a CAD file. You can easily define this property within a wizard step in your .wiz Wizard File:
<step name="Step1" caption="Load geometry file" version="1" context="Project" customContentFile="step1.html">
<description>Import a geometry file.</description>
<callbacks>
<update>action1</update>
</callbacks>
<property name="filename" caption="Geometry file name" control="fileopen"/>
</step>
If you’ve created ACT Apps in the past then you’ll recognize that Wizards used similar syntax — you’ll be able to quickly create your own wizards. For those new to ACT App development, I recommend accessing our free templates we’ve posted on the ANSYS Customer portal.
Wizard creators have complete control over the properties and details displayed at each step. With the engineering details minimized, designers and analysts can focus on what matters most — obtaining superior results with minimal assistance.
Beyond the minimal interface, you can define per-step html sidebar help. Use this to clarify properties and point out tips or provide guidance:
Leverage Workbench Scripting
ANSYS ACT Wizards capitalize on Workbench’s powerful scripting language – allowing apps to “drive” all script-supporting products available within the Project Schematic. This even extends to custom product integrations delivered through the ANSYS Software Development Kit (SDK) or External Connection technology.
You can also extend your Wizard apps to other ANSYS products, including ANSYS Mechanical, ANSYS Meshing, and ANSYS DesignModeler. Create mixed wizards that begin in ANSYS Workbench and transition to these other products for any subsequent step.
Current customers can discover more at the ANSYS ACT microsite on the ANSYS Customer Portal. While there, remember to check out the ANSYS ACT App Store. From simple toolbar additions to fully integrated solvers, you can search, download, and install exciting free and paid apps that extend existing ANSYS products. Make sure you bookmark the site too – new apps are added frequently.
As always, we love to hear from you. Leave a reply below or join in on the ANSYS ACT discussion with our LinkedIn Group, Customization ACTors for Engineering Simulation.
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In a previous blog, I shared with you my excitement about the power of the adjoint solver technology for shape optimization from ANSYS. Since then I have been working tirelessly to make this remarkable technology even more capable. CFD engineers can now understand their designs better and can perform smart shape optimization, all for larger problems with richer physics thanks to the adjoint solver technology.
My numerous interactions with people from all around the world confirmed what I knew: the adjoint solver technology is powerful and has the capability to enable a sea-change in the fluid design process. The technology is already having a positive disruptive impact on design, especially among the early adopters. Products are being improved. Established concepts about some types of fluid systems and how they function have been overturned. New manufacturing procedures are being attempted in order to produce the shapes indicated by the adjoint.
But I also discovered something else: we still needed to make it more accessible and easier to use!
Aerodynamic simulation (CFD) of a Formula 1. The adjoint solver indicates how to modify this Formula 1 wing geometry for optimized downforce.
Making sure that every CFD engineer can harness the power of the adjoint solver technology is a priority for me and my team. Thanks to thoughtful feedback and suggestions from ANSYS clients, we worked on 3 key aspects of the technology:
But enough talking, lets do some showing. Please watch the video below where the power of the adjoint solver is demonstrated. Looking for more information? Please visit the adjoint Tech Tip page and listen to the webinar available on the page!
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In order to accurately meet legislated fuel efficiency and emission standards, present day IC engines operate across complex combustion modes and use novel fuel formulations. Accurate simulation of these modes and fuel formulations requires the use of detailed chemical mechanisms, which typically span hundreds of species and chemical reactions. Even with advances in modern computing technology and algorithms, detailed chemistry simulation approaches are computationally time consuming and scale with the level of detail employed.
In a recent Engine Technology International (ETI) article and an ANSYS white paper, the importance of high-fidelity and detailed chemistry approaches, in IC engine modeling, were detailed.
Further, the articles discussed on ANSYS Forte’s ability to implement these approaches while mitigating the traditional, detailed chemistry vs. computational time trade-off.
Let’s look at some of the computational schemes and approaches, leveraged by Forte that allow it to resolve, hundreds of chemical species and reactions, faster than competitive solutions. Two computational techniques, specifically designed and implemented, to accelerate solution of the chemical kinetics in ANSYS Forte are, Dynamic Cell Clustering and Dynamic Adaptive Chemistry.
Dynamic Cell Clustering
Detailed chemistry solutions in combustion CFD, typically have a large computational overhead, due to repeated calculations of time intensive chemical calculations at each computational cell. ANSYS Forte uses Dynamic Cell Clustering (DCC) to dynamically group/cluster regions of the domain that have similar thermochemical conditions. This reduces the number of detailed chemistry calculations executed at every time step, as calculations are now executed for a group of cells viz. the cluster, and not for each and every cell.
The grouping of computational cells, in the calculation domain, into clusters is achieved by using clustering algorithms which identify cells that have similar thermochemical states. Cell temperature and equivalence ratio are used as the thermochemical clustering variables in the ANSYS Forte DCC algorithm. Though no manual intervention is typically necessary, the user has the ability to influence the cluster creation by defining the maximum temperature and equivalence ratio dispersion/deviation between cells, within each cluster.
The chemical kinetic equations are now solved at the cluster and not at the cell level, using averaged values for the state variables. The cluster averaged chemistry solution is them mapped back to the individual cells in each cluster.
Dynamic Adaptive Chemistry
To ensure validity over a wide range of thermochemical conditions, spanning the engine drive cycle, large chemical mechanisms, containing hundreds of species and reactions are typically used in an ANSYS Forte simulation. However, smaller subsets of the reaction mechanism might be adequate to resolve the chemistry, at certain locations and conditions. Dynamic Adaptive Chemistry (DAC) allows the user to perform on the fly reductions of the user supplied detailed chemical mechanism into smaller locally valid subsets. DAC therefore dynamically tailors the complexity of the chemical mechanism to appropriately reflect the local cell conditions, resulting is faster solution of the chemistry.
When the DAC is activated, the user is prompted to specify a species list that is tracked by the DAC algorithm. This list typically includes fuel species, species related to NOx formation such as NO and NO2, precursors to soot formation such as Acetylene (C2H2) and major products of combustion.
DAC and DCC provide ANSYS Forte users with avenues to accelerate detailed chemistry approaches, with very little manual intervention, thus allowing users to leverage these approaches, while operating within industrial design time frames.
To prove that chemistry really does matter, I invite you to download the Four Essential Facts about Chemistry and Combustion CFD white paper, and check out the recent Engine Technology International (ETI) article on the importance of high-fidelity and detailed chemistry approaches in IC engine modeling.
The post High-fidelity and Detailed Chemistry Approaches in IC Engine Modeling appeared first on ANSYS Blog.
There have been a number of new and exciting workflow enhancements included in ANSYS 16.0 for those who design and analyze rotating machinery to make data transfers and simulation setup easier. Here are the top five enhancements:
1) BladeGen to BladeEditor
In ANSYS 16.0, it is now possible to load BladeGen data into BladeEditor in Workbench. Users could always link BladeGen to BladeEditor (i.e ImportBGD function) in Workbench, but to perform a LoadBGD command, it was required to go into BladeEditor and find the BladeGen file to load manually. With the Create New > Geometry feature from the BladeGen (right click menu shown below) this process is much easier now.
2) Turbo Setup for compressors
ANSYS Workbench 16.0 now has a new component system named Turbo Setup. This will quickly create a new throughflow or ANSYS CFX analysis for different impeller geometry, mesh sizes or operating conditions. Check out the video below to see how it works.
Currently, this can only be used for compressor geometries. If you turn on beta features, you will also see that you can setup a speedline or compressor map from the Turbo Setup panel.
3) BladeGen to Vista TF (ThroughFlow)
If you watched the video above, you may have noticed that it is now possible to connect BladeGen to Vista TF. Of course, if you want to run multiple blade rows using Vista TF, it is still required to connect Vista TF to a BladeEditor model that contains all stages. But if you want to do a quick throughflow analysis on a single component in BladeGen, it is now possible!
4) Radial Element Blade output for Vista RTD (Radial Turbine Design)
In Vista RTD, there is now a drop down menu for Spanwise distribution. Selecting General will provide geometries as created in ANSYS 15.0, but selecting Radial all camberlines will have the same theta value at any given axial coordinate when exported to BladeGen or BladeEditor.
5) Vista CCD (Centrifugal Compressor Design) to CFX
You can now take a design directly from Vista CCD to a CFX setup. This uses the Turbo Setup feature outlined above. Right clicking on the Vista CCD component and selecting a new Turbomachinery Fluid Flow will populate the Turbo Setup component in Workbench with information such as speed, flow rate, etc, and geometry from Vista CCD. A geometry component and Turbomachinery Fluid Flow component will automatically be created as shown below. Updating the project will result in a CFX simulation at the specified design point with a report from CFD Post. All with one click!
I think these features are pretty slick and they should make more productive by reducing the time it takes to create different workflows in Workbench!
The post 5 Improved Workflows for Rotating Machinery Design and Analysis appeared first on ANSYS Blog.
ANSYS Workbench was designed to be a parametric and persistent platform so that you could easily perform design studies and really get into simulation driven product development. Tools like DX can help you drive those parameters, but first, you need to parameterize your model.
You can parameterize the physics or even the meshing, but being able to parameterize the CAD using our bi-directional CAD interfaces is a real ANSYS Advantage.
Earlier posts have showed you how to parameterize DesignModeler, Spaceclaim, Creo Parametric and Catia. Here is a quick demo (made by Richard Mitchell, UK Sales Support Manager) showing you how to parameterize and create named selections in NX.
To create a Named Selection in NX:
To create a parameter in NX:
When you get to Workbench, you need to make sure that you turn on the Basic Geometry Options for parameters and Named Selections and that the filters are appropriate (or cleared to bring in all the parameters or Named Selections).
Once a model is parameterized, it can be driven by adding rows to the table of design points, or using a tools like ANSYS DesignXplorer with algorithms that can be used to generate design points or drive the design optimization process.
The post How to Create ANSYS Workbench Parameters and Named Selections with NX appeared first on ANSYS Blog.
You may have read a quick blog post at Desktop Engineering about ANSYS’s electric machine simulation capabilities. Here we dive into the technical aspects and implications of thermal simulation for electric machines.
Electric machine geometry with cooling and integrated power electronics.
Modern electric machines are designed to meet a wide range of applications, all facing a variety of different technical challenges. They are designed to be compact with high power densities, to have integrated power electronics, to be high-speed for higher power density, and to handle harsh environments.
These challenges all have thermal implications that affect the lifetime and performance of the electric machine and power electronics, and must be balanced with cost goals. ANSYS simulation tools, Fluent and Maxwell, can be used to predict the thermal and electromagnetic performance of these systems, and can therefore be used to optimize design choices for both thermal and cost considerations while meeting all application objectives.
There are many loss mechanisms in an electric machine, and good estimates of loss quantities are necessary to predict performance and temperature. ANSYS Maxwell can be used to calculate electric and magnetic losses. These losses include ohmic losses in the stator windings, core losses in the steel, solid losses in the permanent magnets and solid rotor bars. Several models are available for core losses, including a dynamic transient model, a frequency-domain loss model, and user-defined core loss capabilities.
Using the ANSYS Workbench integrated simulation environment, these electric and magnetic losses can be mapped directly from Maxwell to Fluent. Further mechanical losses such as windage and bearing loss can be added to the thermal simulation according to the operating speed.
ANSYS Workbench environment connecting Electromagnetic and CFD simulations.
Time-averaged transient core losses calculated in Maxwell and mapped directly into Fluent.
Electric machine cooling is a prime topic for CFD simulations where the design of air-flow or fluid-flow is of importance. There are many electric machine cooling solutions, including our partner Motor-CAD, and CFD is not always the answer from a simulation efficiency perspective. However, there is no better tool to determine the complex flow-paths of blowers or turbulent heat exchangers than ANSYS Fluent. In many applications an integrated fan is used to cool the electric machine and even integrated power electronics, and the thermal implication is to keep the critical electronics components (e.g. capacitors and varistors) under acceptable temperature limits.
For electric machines, the thermal implications are often directed at the winding insulation, where increased temperature results in shortened operating lifetimes or increased material cost, and so tremendous efforts are afforded to cool the windings including spray cooling and internal forced-air ducts. Liquid cooling may be required when high power-densities are the goal, and heat-transfer can be improved by proper design of turbulent flow within the liquid channel, and these flows can be studied and optimized through simulation with ANSYS Fluent.
Electric machine temperature and cooling simulation results.
The electric machine lifetime and performance can both be affected by temperature increases. Lifetime is decreased by thermal cycling and fatigue due to degradation. The winding insulation is particularly susceptible, and although high-temperature insulation exists, is a more costly option. Also thermal expansion of steel parts may cause separation of bonded surfaces, which can further degrade thermal performance. The torque output of the machine will also be dependent on temperature — this is true for all types of machines, although with a variety of implications.
Stator winding resistance has a nearly linear dependence on temperature through the copper’s electrical conductivity temperature coefficient. Induction machines have a similar temperature dependence of rotor bar resistance, which affects their operating performance. Permanent magnet machines have a temperature dependence which will affect the maximum operating torque. Within the simulation, the Fluent temperatures can be mapped back into Maxwell to provide a precise spatial variation of temperatures, which has a dramatic effect on permanent magnet fields, including possible irreversible demagnetization. These temperature effects have a direct implication on the maximum peak and continuous operating power for the electric machine.
ANSYS Maxwell is used by design engineers to evaluate the magnetic performance effects of temperature for peak and continuous operating power conditions. For more information check out Comprehensive Multiphysics Design for Electric Machines.
The post Advanced Electric Machine Design with Electromagnetic and CFD Simulations appeared first on ANSYS Blog.
