By Asmaa Lapouge, Cloud Product Marketing Manager, Ansys
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is the science of predicting fluid flow, heat and mass transfer, chemical reactions, and related phenomena. It helps engineers design products in which the flow of fluid components is a major challenge. Some of the applications include conjugate heat transfer, turbomachinery, fluid-structure interaction, combustion, and multiphase simulation, among many others.
A CFD analysis can provide engineers with detailed information on fluid flow behavior such as distribution of pressure, velocity, and temperature. It’s used in all stages of the engineering process, from the conceptual studies of new designs to detailed product development and optimization.
CFD simulations are highly computationally expensive and time consuming, as they require large complex models to solve on a traditional workstation. As innovation is moving at lightning speed, leveraging the power of cloud may help engineers to focus on what matters the most: designing better products faster. In fact, the cloud eliminates the hardware barrier, so designers only need to focus on CFD simulations. It also allows engineers to scale up and down and to access burst capacity to meet their deadlines.
Small changes can make the difference.
The need for speed is critical on the water, and small changes can make the difference between first and last place. Emirates Team New Zealand used Ansys fluid and structural simulation technology to develop and test virtual prototypes of its yacht, minimizing the need for costly and time-intensive physical prototypes. The team evaluated thousands of operating conditions per design to analyze the vessel’s performance and make engineering and design improvements before ever entering the water.
Rather than traditional sails, today’s cup-class yachts are built with wings that transfer wind into forward momentum. Emirates Team New Zealand used an exclusively simulation-driven development process to optimize the wing’s geometry and structure, ensuring ultimate performance and speed while using as little energy as possible.
Using the integrated suite of Ansys solvers, including fluids, structural and composites simulation, Emirates Team New Zealand designed a craft that provided accurate and fast control while remaining within weight targets. The simulation and subsequent optimization proved successful, as the team repeatedly achieved flawless, 100% fly times during races.
Steve Collie, Aerodynamics Coordinator for Emirates Team New Zealand, confirmed that for nearly 25 years, the team relied on engineering simulation via Ansys to optimize the performance of their yachts both above and below the water. Today they’re running more and more simulations, as well as computationally larger simulations, as they look at the yacht as an integrated system and perfect the smallest design details such as dynamic changes in sail shape.
Some of their meshes exceed 50 million cells, which was putting a strain on their internal computing cluster. Recently the team made the decision to supplement their cluster with Ansys Gateway powered by AWS. When compared to their internal cluster, Emirates Team New Zealand can scale up on demand to many times the simulation throughput when using Ansys Gateway powered by AWS and Amazon EC2 HPC6a instances. As a result, they can significantly accelerate their design for the 2024 America’s Cup.
