Introduction

SWAU — pronounced “swah-oo” — is the Southwest ANSYS Users (SWAU), an organization of ANSYS users and people interested in ANSYS, who are located in the Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Western Kansas, and El Paso). The goal of the organization is to provide a sense of community for ANSYS users in the region, to serve as a means of communication about ANSYS, and to provide technical and peer resources to those interested in becoming ANSYS users.

News!

PADT - Wants You!

PADT is looking for a highly motivated individual to join our team in the following positions:

- FE Analysis Engineer

- Medical Lab Manager

For more information please visit the Job Opportunities page on our website.

Become an APDL Master with PADT's APDL Guide

Teach Yourself ANSYS Customization with PADT's APDL Guide

This guide is a compilation of course notes from PADT’s very popular ANSYS Customization with APDL class. By popular demand, PADT has turned these notes into a 288-page guide that steps new and experienced ANSYS users through all of the details of APDL scripting. Its 12 chapters include reference information, examples, tips and hints, and eight workshops. The guide, available in hardcopy only, is an invaluable resource to anyone who wants to start using APDL or become an ANSYS “power user”. At $75 plus shipping, this manual will quickly pay for itself by saving you hours of research and trial-and-error.

For more information on this guide or how to purchase, please visit our website

Have You Considered Mentoring?

Mentoring is one of the services we provide at PADT. Typically, it consists of one-on-one interaction between a PADT expert and a simulation tool user at your facility.  Mentoring goes beyond training to address specific applications of the software to the critical projects at your organization and is tailored to fit your needs. 

Here are some testimonials:

"With your help, I was able to complete my task on time."

"Trying to use ANSYS with little prior ANSYS experience and training, and to finish the project in a specified deadline was quite a challenge… Each time PADT was there to get me through." 

 

"PADT, as I found, has a unique system… because they have a pool of ANSYS experts - with different levels and area of expertise - who can help their clients with combined efforts."

To discuss how PADT's mentoring capabilities in the ANSYS family of products can benefit your organization, please contact Ted Harris (ted.harris@padtinc.com, 480-813-4884) or Steve Hendry (steve.hendry@padtinc.com, 207-541-9198).

ANSYS Technology Offers Swimmers Best Chance of Success in Build-Up to Beijing Games

Swimmers Wearing Speedo LZR RACER Suit Break 35 World Records, Including 17 of 18 at the FINA World Swimming Championships (25m)

To view full article, please click here:

Optimization of diamond d-jet very light jet facilitated by Sculptor design recommendation

Diamond Aircraft Industries, one of the world's premier producers of single and twin-engine propeller aircraft and single-engine jet aircraft, is currently developing a single-engine Very Light Jet (VLJ), the "D-Jet". During the development phase, a suite of advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technologies is applied in order to speed up the engineering process.
Optimal Solutions, with the use of its unique Sculptor real-time CFD design deformation technology, teamed up with ANSYS, Inc., a global innovator of simulation software and technologies, and used that Company's FLUENT® software to assist in the CFD optimization of the wing and nacelle of the D-Jet. The study culminated in a proprietary recommendation to Diamond that projects a significant improvement to wing/nacelle interference and stall characteristics.

To view full article, please click here:

ANSYS, Inc. Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Ansoft Corporation

Acquisition Broadens Capabilities as a Global Innovator of Simulation Software

ANSYS, Inc. a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, and Ansoft Corporation a global provider of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software, announced today that they signed a definitive agreement whereby ANSYS will acquire Ansoft for a purchase price of approximately $832 million in a mix of cash and ANSYS common stock. The strategic, complementary business combination of ANSYS and Ansoft will create the leading provider of 'best-in-class' simulation capabilities, with combined trailing 12-month revenues of $485 million. When completed, ANSYS currently anticipates that the transaction will be modestly accretive to non-GAAP earnings per share in its first full year of combined operations.

To view full article, please click here:

Featured Article: A West Coast Snapshot on CAE

By Eric Miller

A few weeks ago, I was asked to participate in a CAE symposium hosted by HP in Long Beach, California. You should all know about it because we spammed invitations to everyone. PADT agreed to participate because we had some experiences we wanted to share, but also because it was a rare opportunity to see what is going on with all of the CAE tools in a neutral environment. In addition, it was a chance to get the Southern California perspective on CAE – which is different, not because of the beaches, surfing and fusion cuisine, but because of the very strong dominance of “Big Aerospace” in that market.

When I got there I was very pleased; every major CFD and FEA vendor was represented, along with some up-and-coming companies. In fact, it was difficult to jump between the three tracks so that I could hear from everyone. As can be expected, most of the presenters from the other FEA companies were all former MSC people, so it was a reunion for them. There was much talk of “where is so-and-so and remember when we were at the blah-blah user’s group meeting and Fred put…” etc. Despite all of that, a couple of key trends emerged from the presentations and hallway conversations that subscribers of the SWAU Report may find interesting.

CFD is going Mainstream

The most discussed topic at the seminar was that CFD simulation is at the transition point between being a tool for dedicated experts to something used more widely within an organization. The prep/post tools are getting more general and easier to use and the solvers more robust and accurate with defaults. Most people felt that the missing link to becoming mainstream was trying to find a solution of how to get an accurate CFD reading without the extra tweaking of the options needed for a converged solution. Right now there is a danger of non-experts using the tools and getting a solution, but maybe not a correct one. Another highly popular topic was how everyone agreed that the cost of high-performance compute hardware has been reduced to the point where people other than large enterprises can afford a cluster to run on, and they expect to see more of that.

Parallel and Cluster Computing

This brings us to another dominant discussion topic: parallel computing. For both FEA and CFD, everyone was asking vendors about parallel performance. I have to brag that ANSYS’s numbers were met with a bit of a shock by competitors who have not achieved the same level of speedup on the complete FEA structural solve. Most people were just showing parallel speedups for the matrix solution only and could not come close to the overall numbers that ANSYS 12.0 is getting in testing. CFD and Explicit solvers pretty much universally demonstrated linear scaling up to large clusters, which made everyone very happy.

When discussing the clusters that everyone wants to run on, the same issue kept coming up: how do you deal with solving remote and post processing locally? A general consensus of two solutions came out of the meeting. The first was to use remote viewing software like HP’s Remote Graphic’s capability which does screen cloning over the internet (http://www.hp.com/sbso/solutions/pc_expertise/article/remote_graphics.html) The other solution was to have clusters residing locally within the same building so that you can view results on the cluster over a GigE LAN.

ANSYS Vision Becoming Standard Vision

If you have ever seen an ANSYS Vision presentation you might be surprised at how most of the other CFD and FEA vendors have modified their visions to mimic it. Fortunately the CAD company owned tools have dropped their “ALL IS PLM” mantra and started to present their simulation tools as simulation tools. And their visions tended to look like what ANSYS has been promoting for some time: focus on core simulation technology, process automation, efficiency and collaboration.

Everyone Wants to Do Multiphysics

All of the vendors played up whatever Multiphysics they had in their tools, mostly FSI through MPPI or thermal-structural. Many of the users had a lot of questions about how to do Multiphysics and how much success others have had with it. As a strong NASTRAN oriented group, they seemed on a whole to be somewhat unaware of the strong Multiphysics capability in ANSYS and that other Scandinavian code. My impression is that the large Aerospace companies may be lagging in this area.

CAE Tool Preference is Still more Religion than Science

Whenever I attend an event that involves users of multiple tools I’m always surprised at how religious people are about their choice of products. At PADT we keep a close eye on the competition and are always doing benchmarks against them, so we know the capabilities of many of these codes. It was surprising to hear such statements as “We were the first code to have an integrated pre-processor with our solver” from a new CFD company, “ANSYS is great at linear statics, but is still weak at contact and material non-linearities” from the ABAQUS crowd and “I didn’t know NX NASTRAN could do that.” Sometimes when I would explain the capabilities of a “demon code” to one of the faithful, I felt like they were going to tie me to a stake, pile up the cocktail napkins underneath and light me on fire.

Some Take-Aways

I had a bit of time to wait for my flight at the Long Beach airport and spent it thinking about what the real take-away was from this meeting. A significant one was that simulation has grown, and people see the value of it and use it every day to build better products in less time for less money. I also saw that MSC is hurting more than we thought and that the other purveyors of NASTRAN compatible tools are taking the technical lead away from them. Lastly, I think I left a bit more optimistic than when I arrived. The industry has gone through a lot of growth and a lot of distraction. Now it seems like both vendors and users are focused on doing simulation and making better tools for simulation.

To see the presentations that were given visit HP’s website for the seminar: https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2008/events/caesymposium/presentations.php

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us.

Visit us @ www.padtinc.com or call us at (480) 813-4884 or (800) 293-PADT

GOT CFD?

GOT CFD?

Whether you feel you need to start implementing CFD into your engineering analysis or you are looking for increased compute power, PADT, Inc. can assist you! We use two of the best and most comprehensive CFD tools available, FLUENT and CFX, which are unmatched in their breadth and depth of capability when solving the toughest or even the simplest CFD problems.

PADT, Inc. has CFD experienced engineers who are very familiar with FLUENT, CFX and a host of other CFD codes. This experience enables us to quickly assess an application, understand the challenges and provide you with timely, accurate and detailed results.

Give us a call or send us an email if you:

• Want to bring CFD into your engineering design and analysis and don’t currently have the expertise
• Don’t have the compute power to solve larger CFD problems
• Have purchased CFX or FLUENT and want some help, such as mentoring or services to get up to speed quicker
• Need a CFD job done now
• Or just need additional CFD resources

 

 

 

 

To speak with someone about your CFD and other engineering needs, please contact Stephen Hendry at: steve.hendry@padtinc.com or call 1-800-293-PADT (7238).

To view PADT’s CFD webpage, click here.

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