Fluids and thermal simulation

The real-world performance of many products depends on their interaction with fluids, either gases, liquids or a combination of both. Computational fluid dynamics simulation offers the ability to simulate and predict flow and heat transfer behavior. However, in a world of ever-increasing product complexity, understanding a product’s fluid dynamics and heat transfer performance in an isolated manner is no longer sufficient.

To turn the complexity into a competitive advantage, today’s CFD engineers need to be able to model a wide range of fluid-related physics, from reacting flows to aeroacoustics, from multiphase flows to particle dynamics, from electronics cooling to aerodynamics.

Simcenter fluids and thermal simulation software allow you to predict the most complex fluid dynamics problems virtually and turn your insights into product innovation.

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Accurate performance predictions rely on accurate geometry representations in your CFD simulations. In a world that is constantly increasing the pace to bring products to market, you need to prepare your geometry and computational meshes for CFD simulation in record time. Fast, robust, repeatable, high-fidelity, automated meshing technology plays a key role in going faster.

With cutting-edge technology, Simcenter fluids and thermal software allows you to simulate real-world behavior on real-world geometry with high-fidelity surface representations.

Computer-aided design (CAD)-embedded CFD is a key technology in understanding the impact of changes in the geometry or boundary conditions on the fluid dynamics and thermal performance early in the development process. A CAD-embedded CFD technology enables design engineers to conduct fast and frequent what-if analyses, and generate insightful reports inside their preferred CAD platform, to direct the design process.

Simcenter puts the power of computational fluid dynamics simulation into the hands of every design engineer. Use CAD-embedded CFD directly in NX, Creo, CATIA V5 or Solid Edge in order to explore the full potential of your ideas quickly, without disrupting your design process.

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To drive product innovation, it is of paramount importance to discover better designs faster. A precondition to run design exploration studies are automated and robust end-to-end CFD workflows that allow engineers to robustly go from CAD to results in record time. Exploring the possibilities requires CFD studies from simple design sweeps, through the Design of Experiments (DoE) to sophisticated optimization techniques.

With Simcenter you can explore the possibilities with flow-based topology optimization, fully automated CFD simulation workflows and integrated design exploration. Explore hundreds of designs from within your CFD tool and innovate faster without complicated scripting or being an optimization expert.

Computational fluid dynamics is a resource intense simulation method. Depending on the complexity of the CFD simulation at hand, engineers need to be able to choose the most suitable hardware to run their simulation, from a local workstation to a large high-performance computer (HPC) on the cloud. The challenge for CFD engineers is to go faster while ensuring cost and energy efficiency. This can only be achieved with highly scalable, yet flexible, computing solutions and licensing models.

Simcenter offers you fast, flexible and scalable CFD solutions so you can run your CFD problem on the most suitable hardware configuration for a given project. Run a quick job on your workstation, leverage cloud computation, or seamlessly switch between central process unit (CPU)) and graphics processing unit (GPU)-enabled acceleration of CFD simulations. Benefit from innovative, affordable and customizable licensing options to meet your specific simulation needs for any given CFD project.

To engineer innovation, CFD engineers must speed up decision-making with advanced data analysis. In the end, your design decisions often come down to “numbers of merit” and you make significant design decisions based on maximum temperatures, drag coefficients or minimum velocities. When you need access to these numbers, you need them fast. 

But in a world of ever-increasing complexity, CFD post-processing must go beyond numbers to better communicate the performance of your designs in their natural environment to all relevant stakeholders.

For these reasons, Simcenter offers a comprehensive suite of CFD post-processing capabilities to quickly and easily analyze complex simulations. Extract valuable insight from complex data, understand non-intuitive results, identify cause and effect in product performance, and easily compare multiple designs to ultimately make better data-driven decisions. The high-performance visualization and virtual reality capabilities enable rapid design decisions and increase the visibility of results to all stakeholders through powerful engineering storytelling.

Thermal design of electronics is critical to developing reliable products that meet cost and performance goals. With increasing complexity, miniaturization and higher power density, engineers must predict temperature and fluid flow accurately. They must also evaluate cooling from early development stages in order to design efficient thermal management solutions for heat dissipation.

The Simcenter portfolio includes leading CFD software with specific electronics cooling simulation capabilities for chip package level, printed circuit board (PCB), rack and enclosures to large datacenters.

Simcenter supports faster time to market, eliminating board re-spins and reducing prototyping costs for air and liquid-cooled electronics by modeling convection, conduction, radiation and solar loading. Simcenter thermal test solutions support package thermal model calibration to achieve the highest accuracy.

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To enable materials innovation in today’s face-paced environment, access to a computational chemistry toolbox covering the entire hierarchy of material scales is essential. Fast and accurate prediction of physico-chemical properties of complex mixtures can be a game changer for both material development and to increase the fidelity of fluid dynamics simulations.

Simcenter provides industry-leading computational chemistry software for fast and accurate prediction of chemical reaction processes and material properties. With its unique architecture, engineers have the ability to model systems from the quantum to the mesoscale in one solution, offering a fast and accurate digital representation of their systems’ material formulations and bridging the gap to continuum descriptions of fluid and thermal behavior.

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