With the launch of Ansys Discovery, Ansys has launched a significant expansion of its next generation simulation products.
If you’re not familiar with what Ansys has been doing, its Discovery Live system, released a couple of years ago, is focused on the goal of making simulation much quicker to use.
Rather than following the traditional, build geometry, mesh, load, solve cycle, Discovery Live used some new technologies (which take advantage of GPU compute) to hide away much of this process and deliver a near real time simulation system – for both fluid flow and static structural problems.
Discovery Live has grown in capabilities since as well as becoming a core part of PTC’s simulation offering with Creo 7 too.
The issue, as with all things simulation, is that when you make great speed improvements, there’s typically a tradeoff. While much of the benefit was derived from switching to the GPU for super-fast compute, there was also some smart decisions under the hood that the system does to bring you those results so quickly.
This wasn’t necessarily about accuracy, but the resolution of the results. If you wanted to gain a quick understanding of how your geometry and boundary conditions influence performance, then it’s perfect and the interactivity of both geometry manipulation and results supports experimentation that’s key to engineering and design.
But what if you wanted to dial up the resolution of those studies – this is where you would typically move to a more traditional simulation system, be that Workbench, Fluent or whatever.
What Ansys Discovery (note, not Discovery Live) is take the next logical step and integrated not only geometry manipulation, real time instant simulation, but also allow you to take the data, set-ups and experimentation you’ve already done and take it to the next level, using Ansys’ Workbench and Fluent solvers inside the same tool. Not a connection, not an integration to another system, inside the same tool.
“Discovery delivers a next-generation user experience, enables a very quick and intuitive learning curve for every engineer and represents as big a step forward in 3D design as the initial release of Ansys Discovery Live,” said Mark Hindsbo, general manager, design business unit, Ansys.
“Coupled with our unique real-time simulation technology and gold standard solvers, it has never before been so easy to interactively explore a large design space and perform refinement with peak accuracy.
“This enables engineers to bring simulation upfront in the ideation and design phase of product development, uncovering risks early before the costs to correct them become high or difficult to change.”
We’re working on a review of the system right now for the next edition, so stay tuned – our first impressions are that this is a breakthrough once again, from Ansys.
It’s the next logical move to make. Yes, the complexity of the system is growing, but there are some smart decisions being made at the product level to minimise that natural increase in complexity.
There’s also a virtual launch event on 29 July – which DEVELOP3D readers can register for here.
