Industry Summary Articles

Prometech Software, Inc. has released Particleworks for ANSYS, an interface product between Particleworks and leading multiphysics simulation software ANSYS on July 25.

Particleworks, a liquid-flow simulation software based on the moving particle simulation (MPS) method, has been introduced in many industrial fields because of its mesh-free, easy-to-use operation and unique simulation capabilities required for fluid phenomena such as liquid drop, mixing, lubrication, spraying, sloshing and splashing. Its appeal to a broad range of users not only in the automotive industry, but also in the machinery, electric, material, food, chemical, biomedical, energy, and civil engineering industries all over the world has been growing over the past 10 years since its first release in 2009.

Today, demand for such complicated liquid flow simulation is increasing not only in niche users but also a growing number of CAE engineers that work with structural, dynamic, thermal, electromagnetic, and/or general fluid flow analysis, who expend considerable effort to determine the influence of liquid flows to and from those physical behaviors. This is also true for users of ANSYS, the world-leading multiphysics simulation software.

Particleworks for ANSYS is developed to provide a specialized, fast simulation tool for customer’s performing liquid flow simulations with large free-surface deformation, complementing Fluent’s high-resolution, high-accuracy free surface results. Particleworks is now integrated into the ANSYS Workbench environment and can be combined with ANSYS’ simulation capabilities for more realistic product design evaluations.

Incorporating Particleworks into the ANSYS Workbench environment enables key features, such as calculating the deformation of a structure caused by fluid pressure, and the transfer of heat from a structure with the heat transfer coefficient. Fig.1 shows the launch menu of Particleworks in ANSYS Workbench and Fig.2 shows the simulation flow from the liquid flow simulation in Particleworks to the heat transfer simulation in ANSYS.

Particleworks can also be integrated with ANSYS Mechanical for calculating e-drives and the cooling of internal combustion engines. In this case, the information about heat transfer and cooling from the Particleworks simulation can be automatically and seamlessly transferred to ANSYS Mechanical to take into account the efficiency of the oil cooling. ANSYS Mechanical will use the boundary conditions from Particleworks to accurately predict the temperature and stress of the e-drive or piston.

In addition, Particleworks can transfer the mechanical pressure distributions during a transient process, such as the pressure produced by the sloshing of fuel or any other liquid in a tank, or the forces produced by water, mud or snow on the bumper of car, to ANSYS Mechanical. In this case, the force history or time-dependent pressure distribution on the structure is mapped from the Particleworks’ CFD simulation to the mechanical analysis to design and verify the structural resistance under dynamic loads.

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