ATCx CFD 2020 - Welcome & Introduction to Altair and the CFD Solutions

With faster computers comes new complexities that, if understood, can be mastered to yield significant application performance and cost improvements. In this breakout session, we will investigate how the Azure HBv3 offering, with increased memory bandwidth and L3 cache, can drastically reduce time to solution for AcuSolve at scale. We will cover some benchmarks and show how they perform on Azure at various scale points. This data will enable AcuSolve users to reduce time to solution so they can dedicate more time to improving their product.

Together with cloud providers and our other HPC partners, Intel is driving the performance and flexibility that are critical to running advanced HPC workloads in the cloud. We collaborate across our HPC ecosystem to help cloud providers offer accelerated, secure, and agile environments using our latest technologies, such as Intel® Xeon® processors. As cloud customers continue exploring new possibilities and applications for HPC, Intel is dedicated to facilitating their success. Intel works with HPC partners from various industries to enable forward-thinking cloud use cases such as bursting, AI, and advanced analytics. Learn how Intel collaborates with Public and Private Cloud Service Providers to optimize HPC workloads for fast, cost-effective execution on Intel-based Cloud Instances.

Three major trends have emerged over the last decade and continue to dominate the conversation in HPC: the race to Exascale, the rise of AI, and the emergence of Cloud. We will discuss how these trends are individually and collectively shaping the future of HPC, from the technologies we use to how we use them, along with how they are giving rise to new opportunities and challenges for providers and users of HPC.​

In modern Electric Vehicles, body panel design plays a huge role in thermal management for the Li-Ion battery and powertrain performance. Early-stage aerodynamic and thermal prediction is necessary for surface optimization of vehicle exterior. Well defined and controlled flow phenomena need to be achieved around the vehicle during A- surface development phase, to improve the ride performance and handling of the vehicle on the road In this phase, Altair CFD Thermal solver AcuSolve drastically reduced the time consumed for analysis

The aerodynamics design of high-performance bikes plays a significant role in reducing the overall drag, increase in speed, and improving the range efficiency. To improve and sustain the performance of the EV, it is necessary to explore various factors such as aerodynamically streamlining the vehicle design, optimise frontal area, and cooling electronic components as well.

Dactem (a DAM group company), developer of specialist test, measurement and assembly solutions for the aerospace industries, presents an overview of the optimization of a thrust balance used for accurate measurements in electrical thruster qualification endurance testing. The presentation will provide details on how a Multiphysics simulation approach was used to find the optimum design taking mechanical, thermal and electromagnetic performance into account. Speakers: Emmanuel Pouleau, CEO, Dactem (a DAM Group company) Pierre Moutet, Engineer, Dactem (a DAM Group company) Duration: 15 minutes

Altair® EDEM™ is a discrete element method solver that enables users to accurately simulate particulate processes. When coupled with Altair Computational Fluid Dynamics (AcuSolve), these two solutions enable the simulation and analysis of two-phase solid-fluid systems. These simulation tools are widely used in various industries and in academia to deepen the understanding of different unit operations, such as mixers, coaters, fluidized beds and pneumatic conveyors. The unique and novel solutions that Altair offers address the challenges when using DEM and coupled CFD-DEM methods.

Sustainable designs last longer. David Yáñez from Vortex Bladeless, a Spanish start-up, shares his vision of the technology, the strategies used for the integration of the different physical phenomena involved in the simulation-driven design, and the development of their resonating structures having minimal parts susceptible to wear by friction. The simulation results from CFD, with fluid-structure interaction, and electromagnetic field simulation are compared with experimental wind tunnel results and from in-service environments.

Dust is a serious problem for industries that handle and process bulk materials, causing deteriorating ambient air quality, human health concerns, while increases housekeeping labor costs to meet safe levels for health and fire risks. Learn from Dr. Andrew Grima about the technologies employed to develop a successful solution to minimize dust by using calibrated discrete element modeling (DEM) and new dust extraction technology.

An intuitive and robust CFD workflow is available in Altair® SimLab® - a process-oriented, feature-based finite element analysis software that allows you to quickly and accurately simulate the engineering behavior of complex assemblies. For fluid and thermal analyses, SimLab can make the model setup process even faster, repeatable, thereby minimizing tedious manual steps that can be automated. A live demo will be performed using real-world models to show the simple and smooth analysis process in Altair SimLab that goes from CAD to results in minutes.

For the past three decades, Altair’s optimization solutions have driven the innovative, lightweight, and structurally efficient designs of many products you see and use every day. The intense focus on additive manufacturing in recent years have given a boost to topology optimization and generative design, providing more freedom to explore alternatives. Today, we keep on innovating the technology, looking at including multiple physics, like thermal, electromagnetics, and fluid flow to drive design. Altair AcuSolve – coupled with Altair Optistruct – enables engineers to find the optimum shape by simply defining inlets, outlets, and the allowable space in which the solver can work. AcuSolve’s gradient-based topology optimization method will quickly and efficiently find the path of least resistance to deliver fluid flows with minimal effort.

The Digital Twin concept is broadly applicable to all Altair customer base wanting to develop better products faster. We will explain how to maximize the value you can get from the Altair Platform for Digital Twins. We will illustrate how this solution helps diverse engineering teams develop better, more complex products faster by avoiding work in silos. This will include proven uses cases for the convergence of simulation and data.

This presentation shows how advanced simulation technology can provide a cost effective way to minimizing the risk breaching noise regulations. Often the issue is only found out in a prototype testing scenario, bench test results can give misleading information as acoustic character of a rotating component will change in an installed condition. Altair CFD brings a solution to the market for installed fan acoustics by directly calculating the convective field, this virtual method can significantly reduce risk of failure leading to development cost savings and mitigation of timeline overshoot.

Presented at the ATCx Heavy Equipment in May 2021.

Speaker: Andy Fine, Vice President CFD Solutions, EMEA, Altair

Duration: 15 minutes

Martin Kemp, Regional Manager at Altair, Dr. Denis Cumming, a Senior Lecturer at The University of Sheffield, John Milios, CEO at Sendyne, Dr. Gregory Offer, Reader at Imperial College London and finally Professor Jun Xu, Director of Vehicle Energy & Safety Laboratory at The University of North Carolina, present - Developing Predictive Electro Thermal Cell Models for Pack Level Deployment. This presentation will focus on the simulation of the battery cell to represent its complex thermal and mechanical behaviour. The thermal behaviour requires the simulation of the electric behaviour within the cell which leads to the generation of heat. Managing the thermal behaviour is fundamental to the long term health of the battery. The talk provides an overview of the technologies used to simulate battery behaviour, commencing with the understanding of the battery structure including the simulation of electrode manufacture. Both electrochemical and equivalent circuit models will be discussed with the advantages and disadvantages of both methods presented. Finally, machine learning technology is used to create an intelligent cell model which retains accuracy whilst delivering computational efficiency which can be used in Part 2.

Dr Venkat Perumal, Senior Principle Engineer at Stryker Global Technology Center discusses the adoption of simulation in Medical Device industry and how it helps shorten the overall product development cycle time & cost. While adoption of simulation has the ability to reduce and time, physics-based models need rigorous verification, validation and uncertainty quantification. This talk will include examples, where physics-based simulation results lent insight of the product performance, materials modeling and structure-properties correlation. The role of industry-academia-private & public partnership in driving the change from 100% ‘make & break’ to ‘simulation driven product development’ including regulatory submission will be discussed. The video is 12 minutes long and was presented at the Altair Technology Conference 2020.

CFD for Oiling and Thermal Management of Drivetrain Components, presented by Dr. Miloš Stanić, Product Manager at Altair during the ATCx CFD 2020.

Presented at the ATCx CFD 2020, Fast and Accurate Solutions to Optimize CFD Performance by Stephen Cosgrove, VP CFD Solutions Americas at Altair.

Presented as part of the ATCx CFD 2020. Empowering Aerodynamic Design Exploration – Volkswagen Group Research Case Study by Dr. Bastian Schnepf, Technical Manager CFD Solutions at Altair.

Presented at the ATCx CFD 2020. A New & Revolutionary Way to Collect Energy from Wind by David Yáñez, Co-Founder of Vortex Bladeless.

Workshop 3: General Purpose CFD presented live at the ATCx CFD 2020 virtual event.

Recorded at the ATCx CFD 2020 virtual event, this is a Q&A with Torbjörn Larsson, Former Head of CFD for Ferrari F1. With previous roles at BMW F1, General Motors and Saab Military Aircraft, Torbjörn has 30 years of industrial experience in fluid mechanics and CFD. Listen to the questions our audience posed to Torbjörn in this 30 minute session.

Learn how Altair’s flexible and efficient CFD solvers pave the way for simulation-based design in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics.

More and more engineers need to solve problems that can span multiple physics including structural, thermal, electromagnetics, and fluid dynamics.

Full evaluation of a design concept requires the definition of many complex details. However, complex geometric details constrain design flexibility.

The world is full of bulk and granular materials. From ores being mined, soil being excavated, rocks being conveyed, or powders being processed - over 70% of all industrial processes involve the handling or processing of these challenging materials.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has long been regarded as an "expert" tool that requires specialized skill sets to apply properly.

This presentation focuses on presenting a synergy of different simulation methods and tools towards the accurate prediction of power losses, oil distribution and thermal effects focusing on an automotive and aerospace gearbox example. A number of different approaches are described, including CFD, gear design, bearing design and selection and oil selection, with the aim of maximizing efficiency and ensuring adequate lubrication of critical components and cooling of the powertrain components (e-motor and the associated gearbox)

Presenter: Christian Kehrer, Altair [on behalf of Oliver Höfert, Simulation Engineer at Kampmann]

The increasing virtualization of engineering methods is inevitable. This also holds true for the design of systems that take care for the thermal well-being of humans, e.g. in buildings. If it comes to simulation of so-called HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) systems, very often high fidelity approaches like CFD are connected to it. In contrary, this contribution illustrates a 1D modeling approach of a heat exchanger in use of Altair Activate. The presentation explains the implementation of the NTU (Number of Transfer Units) method in a system simulation environment. This includes a short description of the approach itself as well as its current limits. Based on the implementation of a single cell, differing network configurations for the evaluation of use cases of varying complexity will be shown.

Ed Wettlaufer, Technical Manager Mechatronics Group, Altair [on behalf of NAVAIR]

Government solicitations for proposals, or RFPs, for aircraft and airborne systems require preliminary designs with enough fidelity to accurately predict performance, in order to prove the design's ability to meet the Governments performance requirements. Modern high-performance computing provides the leverage to execute previously expensive analyses in areas such as computational fluid dynamics. The results of these high order analyses can be used to populate parameters in 1D systems models which can be easily coupled to medium order models from other disciplines. These capabilities allow the design engineer to rapidly iterate to levels of model maturity and accuracy not achievable years ago, resulting in high levels of confidence in the designs performance predictions in unprecedented time. Moving forward, Altair engineers will employ Multiphysics and co-simulation to execute the Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase (EMD) for one subsystem of the preliminary design developed in the afore mentioned pre-acquisition phase.

Achieving the targeted brand image in a short development cycle time with minimal or zero prototypes is a major challenge faced by EV companies. To overcome this challenge, Altair, HBK and Romax have jointly developed a simulation driven process coupled with capabilities to virtually experience the noise and vibration characteristics, giving engineers a way to obtain real time performance feedbacks as the vehicle is being developed. This joint presentation on the proposed NVH development process covers a wide range of topics, including benchmarking, target setting, full vehicle and motor gearbox simulation loadcases, troubleshooting, optimization and stochastic analysis, and playback of simulation results for subjective evaluations, with a number of new technologies representing the global best practice in sound and vibration design and development. Join us to explore ways to control the sound and vibration characteristics of the vehicle, achieve the right sound, and avoid common NVH pitfalls, while accelerating time to market utilizing and experiencing virtual NVH prototypes.

David Yáñez presents at the UK ATC 2019. Vortex Bladeless is a Spanish start-up that is developing a new wind energy technology. Its key characteristic is the minimization of mechanical elements that can be worn by friction. In the first stage, its application area seems to be distributed energy. For its development, CFD tools are being of vital importance. Both the fluid-structure interaction and the behavior of the magnetic fields in the alternator are being studied mainly with this type of tool. The results obtained are being contrasted with experimental results obtained both in wind tunnel and in real application environments.

A general vision of the technology, the strategies used for the integration of the different physical phenomena involved and the path traveled for its development will be exposed.

Presentation by Dr. Milos Stanic, nanoFluidX Product Manager at Altair.

Optimising the rotational losses of an EV transmission is essential to improve range. Whilst bearing and gear losses are well understood, the interaction between rotating components and transmission fluid rarely exploited other than reducing lubricant viscosity. Effective methods for modelling drag and fluid transfer around a transmission have not robustly existed previously.

Converting electrical power into mechanical power to drive a fluid pump is wasteful. However, in tightly packaged EV transmissions where thermal cooling is limited it is essential to manage the lubricant. A novel method for passively moving fluid around an EV transmission with low losses has been developed. The system uses existing components in the gearbox to move fluid in a controlled manner. The cost savings of using this technology can be used directly elsewhere to improve vehicle range.

In order to iterate through potential design solutions a suitable computer based modelling approach had to be developed. A new smoothed particle hydrodynamics approach was created to predict the fluid movement and the drag level on the remaining components. A correlation of this approach was carried out with real world testing to prove its validity.

We are right at the beginning of the new mobility era with deep impact on the architecture of cars. Hybridization and electrification are the dominating topics in the automobile industry and consequently the powertrain of cars comes into the focus. However, the development of smart and efficient drive assemblies is challenging due to different and increasing demands such as legal restrictions. Numerical simulations can provide profitable support in the development of such components, especially when they are adopted during the early stages of the design process.

Presentation by Pawel Sadowski, Technical Support Manager at DES ART.

Even during building roads your approach may be different from the standard one. The nature often forces engineers to use their creativity and go beyond typical projects. This leads to some unique, futuristic structures or some additional projects that have to be done and at the end are invisible. Our project of heavy lift barge contains in the second group. One part of this project was to proof that positioning system is sufficient to keep right position at the sea even during unfavorable weather conditions. For this purpose we perform numerous CFD analyses using AcuSolve. Computational cases differed in angle of flow, speed of flow and configuration of the barge. As a result of these all analyses defined working area of positioning system.

The physics of the simulated processes is inherently multiphase and involves transient phenomena of various time scales. As such, high fidelity simulation resolution places significant demands on hardware performance, external computing on-demand resource availability as well as flexible and streamlined data handling and post-processing. This presentation outlines the use of Altair’s Acusolve software utilized in combination with VOF-based churning models to provide a comprehensive e-drive system model in a combined in-house and cloud computing environments. An illustrative parametric study aimed at providing an optimum thermal design solution for the motor cooling strategy is documented in the presentation. Trend benchmarking data is presented to validate design direction implementation. Hardware on-demand scalability is highlighted as a crucial result delivery tool.

The easy days of Oil and gas extraction is over, and the ability to extract Oil and Gas from harsh enviornments is very dependent on the ability to overcome technical challenges through the use of advanced numerical analysis and simulation.

Presentation by Laurence Wood, Plaxton

Hot stamped steel parts are being increasingly used in automotive structures for their higher strength to meet safety standards while reducing vehicle weight to improve fuel consumption. However, manufacturing of sheet metal parts by hot stamping to achieve desired properties is extremely challenging as it involves complex interaction of plastic deformation, metallurgical change, thermal distribution, and fluid flow.