ANSYS 14.0 Delivers Capabilities for Improved Efficiency, Accuracy, Speed and Innovation in Product Development

Bangalore, India, December 09, 2011 ANSYS (NASDAQ: ANSS) has launched the newest release of its engineering simulation technology suite, ANSYS 14.0. Designed to optimize product development processes, ANSYS solutions reduce the time and cost needed to foster product innovations.

The advanced technology behind ANSYS 14.0 includes hundreds of new, advanced features that make it easier, faster and less costly for organizations to bring new products to market. The framework for the industry’s broadest and deepest suite of advanced engineering simulation technology, ANSYS Workbench, delivers unprecedented productivity. Tighter integration, for example, brings more physics applications together to power customers’ simulation efforts, enabling them to predict with confidence that their products will thrive in the real world.

As a whole, ANSYS 14.0 delivers new benefits in three major areas:

Amplifying engineering: Companies are looking for ways to leverage their existing engineering resources. Engineers are most effective when they concentrate on making engineering decisions rather than performing manual and tedious software operations. ANSYS 14.0 automates many user-intensive operations, which helps product developers minimize time spent setting up problems.

Simulating complex systems: Today’s products come with built-in complexity — such as state changes, nonlinear phenomena and multiphysics interactions. Designs often combine hardware, electronics and software to form a complex system. This requires new approaches to engineering. The latest ANSYS release allows engineers to simulate such complexity as it exists in the real world, from a single component to entire systems, with uncompromising accuracy.

Driving innovation with high-performance computing (HPC): Competitive pressures demand faster and more frequent product introductions; at the same time, products must be innovative, desirable and high quality. Organizations can resolve these conflicting requirements only by evaluating a large number of design alternatives — more rapidly than ever before. ANSYS 14.0 capitalizes on modern hardware advancements to deliver complex simulation calculations faster than other alternatives on the market today.

"Simulation-Driven Product Development has been a core theme of ours for some time. Using simulation, companies can analyze many design iterations early in the process, thus driving innovation. HPC is a key enabler to reduce design cycle times,” said Jim Cashman, president and CEO of ANSYS.

Amplifying Engineering

Workbench at ANSYS 14.0 goes well beyond enhancing customized workflows, automatic parametric evaluations, and transparent sharing of common data between different applications. Embedded design optimization capabilities enable design of experiments as well as parametric and six sigma studies to reach the right design. Tools developed specifically to manage engineering simulation data are integrated for use across teams, groups and regions, preserving an organization’s intellectual property. ANSYS 14.0 further opens the door for non-traditional users to gain full value from simulation.

In fluid dynamics, prior to setting up a simulation, engineers face the time-consuming task of creating a high-quality mesh. ANSYS 14.0 provides fast and robust capabilities to perform these tasks automatically. The assembly meshing tool extracts fluid volume from CAD assemblies and automatically creates structured Cartesian meshes or unstructured tetrahedral meshes, depending on user goals and preferences.

In the structural mechanics arena, simulating composites structures brings a number of challenges, such as defining hundreds or thousands of plies on a structure that includes various orientations, or analyzing potential failure ply by ply. The dedicated ANSYS Composite PrepPost tool provides significant ease of use for such models. ANSYS 14.0 tightly integrates Composite PrepPost with other structural simulation capabilities in Workbench.

When simulation results must be shared among 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. In ANSYS 14.0, automated algorithms and weighting options have been enhanced to provide users with additional control and correction capabilities. "Using the ANSYS external data tool to import 3-D scan data, we are able to easily map the thickness of aerodynamic profiles onto 3-D models for static and modal analyses, as well as axisymmetric models for thermomechanical studies of our engines," said Hervé Chalons, mechanical and structural analysis engineer at Turbomeca, a Safran company that develops helicopter engines. "The smoothing algorithms and control tools allow us to ensure the quality of interpolated data as well as the robustness of the mapping procedure. Ultimately, this easy-to-use tool will help us save time in setting up our simulation models."

Simulating Complex Systems

R&D teams must accurately predict how complex products will behave in a real-world environment. Only the ANSYS suite comprehensively captures the interaction of multiple physics — structural, fluid dynamics, electromechanics and systems interactions — with deep physics and from within a single simulation system.

A new ANSYS Fluent cosimulation link with ANSYS Simplorer allows engineers to analyze battery systems in Simplorer without neglecting nonlinear behavior of the fluid system. The cosimulation delivers high-accuracy results of multidomain system simulation using a fully integrated set of tools.

ANSYS 14.0 also introduces two-way electromagnetic coupling with stress analysis and the ability to re-simulate the electromagnetic field distribution on the deformed geometry. Applications include electrical machine, magnetic actuator and electric transformer designs in the automotive, aerospace, and power industries, for which accuracy of localized part deformations is important.

The successful design of many industrial processes depends on accurately predicting the dynamics of, and interaction between, different phases (gas, liquid, solid particles). Because of continuous progress in the area of multiphase modeling, ANSYS fluid dynamics capabilities at 14.0 widen the range of multiphase applications that can be simulated accurately, efficiently and robustly. Applications that must consider complex nonlinear phenomena — such as biomedical devices, hot rolled steel, acoustics and brake squeal — can benefit from the suite’s advanced models. For example, biomedical application developers access 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.

Driving Innovation with HPC

For enhanced insight, ANSYS 14.0 features a comprehensive suite of solver and HPC advancements across the entire range of physics. Smart solver management enhancements — including architecture-aware partitioning — evenly size and efficiently distribute jobs to available compute processors. “Petrobras relies on ANSYS software for its superior parallel scalability, together with advanced multiphase models and dynamic meshing," said Carlos Alberto Capela Moraes, technical consultant at CENPES (Petrobras Research and Development Center). “New enhancements such as architecture-aware partitioning and improved scalability will allow us to consider even more detailed, accurate and complete simulations than ever before — yielding the kind of understanding that is essential to reproducing critical scenarios and complex operations of upstream processing systems in the oil industry.”

GPU advancements are being leveraged to produce increased hardware performance. 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. ANSYS is committed to staying synchronized with the latest computing technologies.

In a compressor or turbine, accurately capturing the transient interaction between rotating and stationary blades is complicated by the different blade count (or pitch) between different stage rows. This pitch change often means that a time-accurate simulation requires modeling the full wheel, a full 360 degrees of geometry — a transient simulation that is sometimes computationally prohibitive. Users can dramatically reduce computation requirements, in terms of time and memory, with the new advanced transient blade row methods in ANSYS CFD 14.0. Only a few blade passages are required for simulation, yet results are highly accurate predictions of transient interactions.

In the antenna design field, an important research topic is analysis of finite-sized antenna arrays, which can provide beam-steering capability. Due to the structures’ large size, rigorous analysis with full-wave 3-D simulators has been a challenge. An accepted method is to solve a single element of the array with a linked boundary condition, extracting performance of this single element effectively embedded in an infinite array. Because the method neglects edge effects from the true, finite size of an array, the results are approximations of far-field patterns and element-to-element coupling factors. The new finite array capability in ANSYS HFSS 14.0, built upon the proven ANSYS domain decomposition and adaptive meshing technologies, models the finite array explicitly. The time- and memory-efficient HPC technique properly predicts the array’s behavior including finite-size edge effects.

ANSYS 14.0 is available this week for customer download.

About ANSYS, Inc.

ANSYS brings clarity and insight to customers' most complex design challenges through fast, accurate and reliable engineering simulation. Our technology enables organizations ― no matter their industry ― to predict with confidence that their products will thrive in the real world. Customers trust our software to help ensure product integrity and drive business success through innovation. Founded in 1970, ANSYS employs more than 2,000 professionals, many of them expert in engineering fields such as finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, electronics and electromagnetics, and design optimization. Headquartered south of Pittsburgh, U.S.A., ANSYS has more than 60 strategic sales locations throughout the world with a network of channel partners in 40+ countries. Visit www.ansys.com for more information.

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