CFD software analyses automotive powertrain

CD-adapco will showcase its full spectrum of CAE solutions for the automotive industry at the upcoming SAE World Congress in Detroit.

At the upcoming SAE World Congress, CD-adapco will showcase its breakthrough approach to simulating flow, thermal and structural analyses.

Some of the applications this revolutionary approach can benefit include powertrain analyses of the thermal stresses in an engine structure.

As the leading provider of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to the auto industry, CD-adapco will be exhibiting the full spectrum of CAE solutions for the automotive industry, from developments for the external aerodynamics community, including Nascar drafting studies, to aftertreatment.

The latest release of Star-CD included the ability to solve structural analyses using its existing flow and thermal, finite volume (FV) solver.

This technology delivers a number of interesting possibilities, particularly for conjugate heat transfer and stress, fluid-structure interaction and melting and solidification (where the continuum changes state from fluid to solid or vice-versa) simulations.

First, it enables structural engineers to use the same level of mesh detail as their CFD counterparts: many millions or even a billion of cells.

As numerical error diminishes as cell or element size reduces and, structural models are often required to resolve small-scale geometric detail, the ability to run simulations with many millions of cells - tens of millions of DOF - is appealing.

Secondly, is the ability to solve a flow, thermal and structural analysis through one user interface, using one solver and one mesh.

Industry veteran and CD-adapco's Automotive Director, Richard Johns, is excited by the results delivered: "Star-CD brings automatic polyhedral meshing and scalable parallel processing to structural analysis".

"When I heard we had run a 4 million polyhedral cell (around 13 million DOF), nonlinear stress calculation, on 32 CPUs, in 15 minutes, I knew we'd made a breakthrough".

The CD-adapco team will be on Booth 1901 throughout the SAE World Congress from 16th to 19th April 2007 in Detroit.

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