Tag Archives: fluid dynamics

Canadian Ingenuity Reduces Risk of Powerhouse Flooding

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In Canada, we are proud to contribute to reducing the global carbon footprint by exploiting renewable energy sources that are readily available, like hydropower. However, it is important to manage this resource responsibly and cost effectively by reducing risk of failure and increasing efficiency. Using fluid dynamics, structural mechanics and thermal analysis, Kawa Engineering Ltd. delivers a broad range of services to the hydropower industry (as well as others) to allow customers to design and test many parts of these facilities before they are built. As part of celebrating Canadian Engineering Month, here’s a recent interesting project that developed a location for a powerhouse.

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3-D geometry used for flood analysis. Elevations are relative to sea level.

We used engineering simulation to help locate the powerhouse close to a waterfall but in a spot with minimal flood risk. If flooding occurred in the powerhouse, it would be extremely costly. Finding a proper location also means that there is decreased need for additional components to protect electrical equipment (generator, turbine, switch box, etc.) if flooding occurs; it determines the cut and fill required for construction; and lessens construction resources. Continue reading →

ANSYS Hall of Fame Class of 2013

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The 2013 ANSYS Hall of Fame competition is now complete — this year with a record-breaking 134 entries. The annual ANSYS Hall of Fame Competition determines the most eye-popping simulation images and videos from our customers, showcasing how they use ANSYS to realize their product promise. We’d like to thank all of those who shared their great work.

Editors Note: We’ll be sharing more of our submissions over the coming weeks on our ANSYS Facebook page.

Without further ado…we are pleased to announce this year’s ANSYS Hall of Fame: Continue reading →

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and ANSYS Part II

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image of Katherine Bradley and Swaminathan Subbiah

Katherine Bradley discusses unmanned aerial vehicles with Swaminathan Subbiah from ANSYS

“Designing unmanned aerial vehicles has many technical challenges, on the fluid dynamics side as well as the software control side,” remarked Swaminathan Subbiah, the vice president of corporate product and market strategy at ANSYS. In my last blog, I talked about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their use in reconnaissance in the military and commercial applications in industry. I also touched on how ANSYS software solved some engineering problems of UAVs. To find out how ANSYS was involved, I interviewed Suti Wirogo, the senior technical account manager, and Rob Harwood, the aerospace and defense Industry marketing director, both at ANSYS. We all sat down one rainy Friday afternoon to discuss the challenges of UAVs and how ANSYS can help to solve the devices’ engineering challengers. Continue reading →

ANSYS Helps Speedo Make a Splash (Well less actually!)

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Here at ANSYS, we’ve been anxiously awaiting the moment we would tell the world that Speedo® used ANSYS CFD at their Aqualab® to once again create leading-edge swimwear, equipment and apparel under their Fastskin Racing System® line. Yesterday morning, the press release hit the wire.

I remember very clearly the 2008 article that described the use of CFD to improve swimsuit performance, published in our ANSYS Advantage Magazine. These suits were quite the success in the 2008 Olympics! At the time, I thought that nothing more could be done with swimwear, that this was the final evolution in the area of high-performance swimsuits.

How wrong I was! The 2008 suit would not be the final evolution, it would be the beginning of a series of innovations. The newest Speedo development is, in fact, a system that comprises a choice of 19 products, including caps, goggles and suits, allowing swimmers to select the best combination to meet their preferences and performance needs. Continue reading →

Confidence By Design ANSYS Workshops

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I expect you’ve seen umpteen emails about Confidence by Design ANSYS workshops being held in different cities North America during May and June. I’m taking this moment to share some photos and information from our event held May 8, 2012, in Minneapolis. And, to remind you that you can attend similar events that are coming up: June 5 in Detroit, June 14 in Chicago and June 20 in Houston.

ANSYS Workshops

image of welcome signThese events have been designed to provide more of a technical deep dive and to show how you can use ANSYS tools to realize your product promise with confidence; hence the name, Confidence by Design. (Even as a long-time ANSYS employee, I learned something new from the material provided.) The agendas are tailored to meet the needs of the local customer base. For example, Detroit offers an automotive, focus whereas the Minneapolis workshop was focused for the healthcare industry. Continue reading →

Computational Fluid Dynamics and Video Games

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A series of articles by Dr. Michael J. Gourlay on Fluid Simulation for Video Games recently caught my attention. Well, actually, the title was what first captured my eye, as I could not figure out what computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and video games had in common. After reading the articles, I understood that the idea is to use fluid simulation technology to improve video game technology in general and “virtual world rendering” in particular. For those of us used to thinking about CFD to design fuel-efficient aircraft or develop nuclear technologies, what a breath of fresh air! Continue reading →

From Optimization to Smart Optimization – Adjoint Method

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I am always impressed by the capabilities of computational fluid dynamics and how companies and their engineers strive to optimize their design to create high-reliability, high-performances products. This is why I was extremely excited when I heard about a new optimization technique known as the adjoint method.

Of course, several different optimization techniques are already commonly used. The easiest technique is to optimize a product by analyzing a large number of configurations and selecting the one that delivers the best performance. This can be done using experiments or simulations. I will only discuss the simulation concept in the rest of this post; after all, we already know that simulation tools delivers great ROI and provide an excellent way to optimize design. The problem is that employing thousands of simulations to find the best design is much too time consuming. But, performing simulation for only a fraction of those designs and using practices like gradient methods, evolutionary algorithms and reduced-order models will identify the best design using a reduced set of simulation results.

Continue reading →