Originally, ANSYS Discovery had a simple purpose. It provided design engineers and analysts with an intuitive simulation tool. It offered an effective design exploration space and a place to learn the basics of simulation. ANSYS Discovery’s latest release introduces a new set of capabilities augmenting the experience for design engineers and analysts. Now both parties can seamlessly perform simulations and collaborate across the product development lifecycle.
A Collaborative Design Process Involving Simulation
Engineers are under increasing pressure to design and build complex products fast. But today’s smart, connected mechanical products are subject to competing requirements. They must, for example, integrate a range of electrical, electronic, and software components.
In response, engineering teams embraced a collaborative design process. They shifted to a strategy that introduces simulation early in the development lifecycle.
Now, simulation is routine. Design engineers use it to drive their design decisions. Analysts use it to validate these designs against the product requirements. And from its first release, ANSYS Discovery has satisfied the needs of both groups.
In this post, we examine ANSYS Discovery’s latest release. We explain how it empowers both design engineers and analysts to develop complex products. We focus on two main themes for simulation-driven product development:
- how ANSYS Discovery pushes simulation boundaries and
- how the latest release increases the productivity of design engineers and analysts.
Pushing the Boundary of Simulation
ANSYS Discovery’s range of features has always helped design engineers and analysts collaborate and design complex products with ease. The latest version pushes this capability further.
Additive manufacturing permits engineers to explore non-prismatic designs. This ability unlocks new design possibilities for certain essential components. ANSYS Discovery’s topology optimization feature allows engineers to incorporate additive techniques. In this way, they uncover new design possibilities that are often difficult to comprehend using traditional design approaches. What’s more, this feature respects both the manufacturing constraints and different load cases.
ANSYS Discovery now simulates conjugate heat transfer for fluid flows. So, engineers can design complex products where heat transfers are essential. For example, an engineer may want to simulate the flow of hot gases as they heat a proposed exhaust manifold design. They may want to understand flow parameters like pressure drop or mixing of gases or observe how hot the manifold components become. Using ANSYS Discovery, engineers can select suitable material with appropriate expansion properties.
That’s not all. ANSYS Discovery can simulate cooling of electronic components, compute the efficiency of heat exchanger design, and more. Engineers can also simulate multiple physics scenarios. In one scenario, thermal behavior and cooling may become increasingly important. In another, conjugate heat transfer capabilities may be the priority. The latest release of ANSYS Discovery takes all these simulations in stride.
On the structural side, ANSYS Discovery now includes a sliding contact feature that allows engineers to simulate components that both touch and slide against each other. This feature accurately simulates the behavior of real-world, moving components.
To check designs against requirements, analysts often need high-end simulation features. They may want to include multiple elements for meshing, use advanced material models, or alter different solver options, for example. In these situations, analysts can transfer the simulation setup to other high-fidelity ANSYS simulation products—such as ANSYS Mechanical or ANSYS Fluent—with a single mouse click. They no longer need to redefine the simulation in the other ANSYS product, and can spend that time on other pursuits.
Increasing the Productivity of Simulation-Driven Product Design
ANSYS Discovery has always prioritized design engineer and analyst productivity. From its first version, engineers could easily manipulate the geometry that they wanted to simulate, for example. They could also explore the design space or optimize and visualize the simulation results in real-time. ANSYS Discovery has also been a popular learning platform where design engineers, with the help of internal analysts as mentors, could boost their simulation knowledge and productivity. The latest release builds on these existing capabilities.
ANSYS Discovery has added features to enhance simulation templates. Analysts share their knowledge and best practices to design engineers by capturing all the simulation setup steps in a template. As the analyst is creating the simulation, ANSYS Discovery automatically records the simulation steps. Design engineers who use these templates can learn by replaying these steps. Engineers can add notes to these steps, further enhancing their learning experience and sharing it with other team members.
The visualization of simulation results provides vital insight. It helps engineers understand the behavior of the design. Engineers often need to zoom, rotate, or section the model to achieve the proper position. Then, they apply suitable visualization parameters to view the results. They may want to access the same viewing experience at a later date, which requires repeating the same steps. This is a highly inefficient way of working. ANSYS Discovery’s saved scene feature addresses this by saving important results and configurations. So, anyone can view the results in the same way in the future, saving time and minimizing the likelihood of inconsistencies and errors.
Conclusion
ANSYS Discovery is an intuitive platform for both design engineers and analysts. It sets collaboration at the center of the design process and expedites it. With its latest release, ANSYS Discovery continues to prioritize the end-user experience with a range of features.
Many of these features account for the growing complexity of today’s products. Users can easily integrate and simulate a range of electrical, electronic, and software components. They can simulate next-generation additive manufacturing techniques and complex heat flows or sliding contacts. They can also easily include manufacturing constraints and different load cases.
These features can boost design engineers’ simulation expertise and productivity. ANSYS Discovery also enables knowledge-sharing through templates, annotations, and automated visualization.
ANSYS Discovery is an intuitive design exploration tool that helps manufacturers build a simulation-savvy workforce. It is evolving alongside the requirements and complexity of today’s products. There’s no doubt that more exciting developments are on the horizon for ANSYS Discovery.