CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

2 June 2009

Product News

CHEMKIN-CFD: Now Available at No Cost to ANSYS FLUENT Users Via Partnership Between Reaction Design and ANSYS, Inc

Reaction Design®, the clean technology chemistry leader, announced a strategic relationship with ANSYS, Inc. The agreement calls for Reaction Design to deliver to ANSYS customers a new ANSYS® FLUENT® optimized version of CHEMKIN-CFD™, an advanced chemistry simulation technology that couples accurate chemical kinetics to flow simulations Available to ANSYS FLUENT licensees for free, CHEMKIN-CFD, coupled with ANSYS FLUENT technology, facilitates highly accurate combustion and emissions analysis for automotive engine or industrial power generation designs.

In the energy, transportation, and chemical process sectors, today’s challenges of increased fuel flexibility, high-efficiency demands, and emissions reductions, coupled with a difficult economy, set the stage for an increased role for accurate simulation. In the current economic climate, efficiency of design and operation are paramount for the successful system designer. Commercial combustion firms and materials manufacturers recognize that achieving low-emissions design, improving productivity and increasing performance require incorporating more detailed chemistry in their simulations. Using engineering simulation effectively in design workflows can enhance designer ingenuity, reduce development costs, and improve speed to market.

“In today’s world, the ability to accurately predict the effects of detailed chemistry in combustion or catalytic systems is critical. However, past technology solutions have forced engineers to make tradeoffs between accuracy and time to results,” said Bernie Rosenthal, CEO of Reaction Design. “Our joint solution with ANSYS provides engineers a fast, no-cost, highly predictable solution that meets complex simulation requirements throughout combustion, aftertreatment and materials applications — thereby reducing the need to make the risky accuracy versus speed tradeoff.”

"Reaction Design’s contributions to the development of clean technology combustion systems and fuels through the application of detailed chemistry is well recognized, and it is with great pleasure that we elevate our partnership with such a technology leader,” said Dipankar Choudhury, vice president of corporate product strategy and planning at ANSYS, Inc. "CHEMKIN-CFD helps ANSYS FLUENT users improve their understanding of complex reacting flows and chemistry. The combined power of these leading technology solutions from both ANSYS and Reaction Design deliver exceptional computational speed needed to accurately simulate behavior of complex designs while providing an in-depth understanding of flow and chemistry. Significant speed improvements have been realized relative to earlier releases of this joint solution."

Traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solution algorithms use an iterative process to arrive at convergence for all the momentum, energy, species and mass conservation equations in a 3-D model. If the chemistry is stiff (as it is in most combustion simulations and surface-catalytic systems), such an approach can lead to instabilities that dramatically increase simulation run times. Reaction Design’s CHEMKIN-CFD employs a proprietary solver technology to speed up simulation with high levels of accuracy. Specifically designed to handle stiff gas-phase and gas-surface chemistry, CHEMKIN-CFD, together with ANSYS FLUENT, solves species and energy conservation equations in a closely coupled manner for both transient and steady-state problems. Within a flow simulation, the ANSYS FLUENT optimized version of CHEMKIN-CFD solves coupled conservation equations at every cell (or grid point), at every iteration and at every time-step. ANSYS FLUENT software then performs transport calculations over all grid points, optionally using the transport properties provided by CHEMKIN-CFD. In this scenario, the combination of ANSYS FLUENT and CHEMKIN-CFD allows robust convergence and accurate resolution of chemistry terms for complex reaction mechanisms.

Availability:

CHEMKIN-CFD is available today, and is included with each ANSYS FLUENT download. License files may be obtained from Reaction Design for up to four free processes. For more information, please visit http://www.reactiondesign.com/.

For support, please contact Reaction Design at 1-858-550-1920 or support@reactiondesign.com

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