What's New in AcuSolve 2021.0
What’s New in Altair AcuSolve 2021.0
Compressible Flow
While AcuSolve has long-supported variable density flows a new regime of compressible flow including shocks and expansions is now available for users to explore. Historically, AcuSolve has been a workhorse general-purpose incompressible pressure-based Navier-Stokes flow and thermal solver. With v2021, new horizons await as the same robustness, speed, and accuracy that users have enjoyed for years is now available for fully compressible flows up to Mach 1.5. Many commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solvers must adhere to strict Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) constraints to maintain stability and this results in users having to create overly refined meshes for high speed flows. The CFL restrictions of AcuSolve are orders of magnitude less than our competition and the robustness of the solver ensures that your time will not be spent crafting perfectly shaped elements; it will be spent exploring and understanding the details of your simulation.
Mach number distribution in the Sajben diffuser with standing shock
Modeling Particles in Flow
It is now possible to perform a full two-way coupling between EDEM and AcuSolve to model complex particle-fluid systems such as fluidized beds, pneumatic conveying and solid-liquid mixing where the fluid impacts the particles and the particles also have an effect on the fluid. Particles much larger than the mesh size are permitted. Heat transfer is supported for particle-particle, fluid-particle, and solid-particle interactions.
Particles sifting through generic agriculture sieve
Liquid Droplets
Multiphase flows are present in a wide variety of manufacturing processes. From filling and draining to mixing and sloshing AcuSolve’s level set feature can capture the relevant details and large-scale quantities that designers of these systems require. With AcuSolve v2021 the level set feature gets a little closer to, or farther from, its surroundings. Industries such as die coating and ink jet manufacturing are very interested in modeling the near-wall behavior of multiphase flows and now users can model the effect of wall contact with improved fidelity. Both hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces can be specified.
Two droplets falling on inner hydrophilic surface and outer hydrophobic surface
Two droplets falling on inner hydrophobic surface and outer hydrophilic surface
Anisotropic Cylindrical Conductivity
Thermal management is a critical part in the design of any battery electric system. As battery cell energy densities continuously increase, the need for accurate thermal management prediction and proper modeling approaches grows as well. For cylindrical cell battery system design, AcuSolve now offers anisotropic cylindrical conductivity to capture the cell-level thermal behavior most accurately.
Battery pack temperature evolution using anisotropic cylindrical conductivity