What's New in Altair Flux™ 2022

Let’s have a look at the key features and improvements of Altair Flux™ 2022!

You will find at the end of the article a video presenting these new features.

ALTAIR SIMLAB, A NEW POWERFUL INTERFACE TO RUN FLUX COMPUTATIONS

Altair SimLab is a very powerful environment with an easy-to-use interface. From CAD to post-processing, it is now offering a very fast way to run Flux 3D magnetostatic analysis, with unique CAD handling and meshing capabilities, within a very intuitive workflow.

Within SimLab, 2D static and transient analysis can also be run.

You can discover these capabilities through dedicated tutorials for 2D applications and for 3D applications.

A TIGHTER INTEGRATION OF FLUXMOTOR & FLUX

Those of you designing electric motors probably know about FluxMotor. This is a very intuitive and fast tool for the pre-design of electric machines. It is often used in association with Flux to provide a more in-depth analysis. Both tools are now installed together and just a few clicks are needed to switch from one to the other.

ADVANCED MODELING OF LOSSES

When designing high-speed machines, extra losses in windings due to proximity and skin effects need to be assessed. These copper losses can now be calculated in a very efficient way in 2D transient, without describing each wire. It is based on a homogenization method and offers a great gain of time when solving and for pre-processing, also keeping a very good accuracy.

Aluminum or copper foil coils are sometimes used in power transformer applications. To model this kind of windings, homogenization methods can also be used. It is a very efficient way to compute losses in such coils in 2D steady-state AC simulations.

Taking into account magnetic hysteresis during transient solving is possible in Flux, relying on the Preisach’s model. With this version, both solving speed and post-processing capabilities have been improved when using such models.

MATERIAL MODEL IDENTIFICATION

Flux has many advanced models to represent accurately the magnetic behavior of materials. These models need to be fed with data coming from experiments or from manufacturers’ datasheets. To ease the fitting process, a new set of tools is proposed and available in Flux installation, and will help you get the best of Flux models to represent B(H) characteristics, consider hysteresis or compute iron losses.

FREE SHAPE OPTIMIZATION

This new way of doing optimization has been introduced in Flux 2021.1 [Link]. In 2022, new responses and constraints can now be considered, giving you more possibilities in the definition of your optimization problems.

DESIGNING AXIAL FLUX MACHINES

A set of macros is available to automate the modeling of axial flux machines in Flux. Thermal computations are now considered, both for steady-state and transient analysis. 

AND ALSO:

• FEMT: various improvements of the Flux e-Machine Toolbox to compute efficiency maps
• Curves viewed during solving are automatically created for post-processing
• Improvement of layer mesh for efficient meshing of eddy current effects in 3D.
• Volume meshing speed-up
• New API to drive Flux from Python.

Discover these improvements in more detail by looking at the Release Notes of Altair Flux™ 2022

and look at the following video : 

You can also find the full documentation online: 

• Documentation
• Installation guide
• How to 
• Tutorials

If you want to know more about FluxMotor and its new features, look at the Release Notes.

Enjoy the new version!

Yann Le Floch - Senior Program Manager Flux

Vincent Leconte - Senior Director of Global Business Development, Electromechanical Solutions