10x with ANSYS 17.0 – Get an Order of Magnitude Impact

The ANSYS 17.0 release improves the impact of driving design with simulation by a factor of 10.  This 10x  jump is across physics and delivers real step-change enhancements in how simulation is done or the improvements that can be realized in products.

Unless you were disconnected from the simulation world last week you should be aware of the fact that ANSYS, Inc released their latest version of the entire product suite.  We wanted to let the initial announcement get out there and spread the word, then come back and talk a little about the details.  This blog post is the start of a what should be a long line of discussions on how you can realize 10x impact from your investment in ANSYS tools.

As you may have noticed, the theme for this release is 10x. A 10x improvement in speed, efficiency, capability, and impact.  Watch this short video to get an idea of what we are talking about.

Where is the Meat?

We are already seeing this type of improvement here at PADT and with our customers. There is some great stuff in this release that delivers some real game-changing efficiency and/or capability.  That is fine and dandy, but how is this 10x achieved.  There are a lot of little changes and enhancements, but they can mostly be summed up with the following four things:

Tighter Integration of Multiphysics

Having the best in breed simulation tools is worth a lot, and the ANSYS suite leads in almost every physics.  But real power comes when these products can easily work together.  At ANSYS 17.0 almost all of the various tools that ANSYS, Inc. has written or acquired can be used together. Multiphysics simulation allows you to remove assumption and approximations and get a more accurate simulation of your products.

And Multiphysics is about more than doing bi-directional simulation, which ANSYS is very good at. It is about being able to transfer loads, properties, and even geometry between different software tools. It is about being able to look at your full design space across multiple physics and getting more accurate answers in less time.  You can take heat loads generated in ANSYS HFSS and use them in ANSYS Mechanical or ANSYS FLUENT.  You can take the temperatures from ANSYS FLUENT and use them with ANSYS SiWave.  And you can run a full bidirectional fluid-solid model with all the bells and whistles and without the hassles of hooking together other packages.

To top it all off, the system level modeler ANSYS Simplorer has been improved and integrated further, allowing for true system level Multiphysics virtual prototyping of your entire system.  One of the changes we are most excited about is full support for Modelica models – allowing you to stay in Simplorer to model your entire system.

Improved Usability

Speed is always good, and we have come to expect 10%-30% increases in productivity at almost every release. A new feature here, a new module there. This time the developers went a lot further and across the product lines.

The closer integration of ANSYS SpaceClaim really delivers on a 10x or better speedup for geometry creation and cleanup when compared to other methods. We love SpaceClaim here at PADT and have been using it for some time.  Version 17 is not only integrated tighter, it also introduces scripting that allows users to take processes they have automated in older and clunker interfaces into this new more powerful tool.

One of our other favorites is the new interface in ANSYS Fluent, just making things faster and easier. More capability in the ANSYS Customization Toolkit (ACT) also allows users to get 10x or better improvements in productivity.  And for those who work with electronics, a host of ECAD geometry import tools are making that whole process an order of magnitude faster.

Industry Specific Workflows

Many of the past releases have been focused on establishing underlying technology, integration, and adding features. This has all paid off and at 17.0 we are starting to see some industry specific workflows that get models done faster and produce more accurate results.

The workflow for semiconductor packaging, the Chip Package System or CPS, is the best example of this. Here is a video showing how power integrity, signal integrity, thermal modeling, and integration across tools:

A similar effort was released in Turbomachinary with improvements to advanced blade row simulation, meshing, and HPC performance.

Overall Capability Enhancements

A large portion of the improvements at 17.0 are made up of relatively small enhancements that add up to so big benefits.  The largest development team in simulation has not been sitting around for a year, they have been hard at work adding and improving functionality.  We will cover a lot of these in coming posts, but some of our favorites are:

1. Improvements to distributed solving in ANSYS Mechanical that show good scaling on dozens of cores
2. Enhancements to ACT allowing for greater automation in ANSYS Mechanical
3. ACT is now available to automate your CFD processes
4. Significant improvements in meshing robustness, accuracy and speed (If you are using that other CFD package because of meshing, its time to look at ANSYS Fluent again)
5. Fracture mechanics
6. ECAD import in electromagnetic, fluids, and mechanical products.
7. A new solver in ANSYS Maxwell that solves more than 10x faster for transient runs
8. ANSYS AIM just keeps getting more functions and easier to use
9. A pile of SpaceClaim new and improved features that greatly speed up geometry repair and modification
10. Improved rigid body dynamics in ANSYS Mechanical

More to Come

And a ton more. It may take us all of the time we have before ANSYS 18.0 comes out before we have a chance to go over in The Focus all of the great new stuff.  But we will be giving a try in the coming weeks and months. ANSYS, Inc. will be hosting some great webinars as well.

If you see something that interests you or something you would like to see that was not there, shoot us an email at support@padtinc.com or call 480.813.4884.