What’s New in Altair Flow Simulator 2024
Altair EmployeeFlow Network Grouping
Items in the flow network can now be grouped like thermal network grouping introduced in the last release, 2023.1. The groups can be named and colored. All entities displayed within the group can also be colored with the group’s color. Collapsing the groups into blocks can help model organization, visualization, and GUI speed (if the model is very large). Note that groups can contain either flow items (elements and chambers) or thermal items (resistors and nodes), but groups can’t contain both flow and thermal items.
Turbulator Friction and Heat Transfer in Tube Elements
The advanced tube and incompressible tube elements now have turbulator friction and heat transfer coefficient (HTC) options. Turbulators could be modeled in previous releases using friction and HTC multipliers, or user defined custom correlations. There is also a turbulated passage element, but it is limited to only friction calculations on fully turbulated passages. The new turbulator correlations for friction and HTC can be used for tubes with full or partially turbulated passages.
Rotating Surfaces in Tube Elements
The advanced tube and incompressible tube elements can now calculate the fluid swirl and temperature change due to windage for an annulus or coaxial shaft with a rotating surface. Previous versions would assume the fluid swirl is the same as the tube rotation. The friction factor and heat transfer coefficient correlations will use an effective velocity based on the relative tangential and axial velocity.
Generic Heat Exchanger Improvements
The Generic Heat Exchanger (GHX) has 1 new pressure loss option and 3 new heat transfer options. The “No Loss” pressure drop option can be used when the fluid pressure drop is not important, but solution speed is critical. The new heat transfer options include target exit temperatures and NTU.
Generic Heat Exchanger components can be arranged in a matrix to capture more details of the heat exchanger. For example, a vehicle radiator can be modeled with a single GHX component using a single cold air inlet temperature to calculate overall heat exchange between the air and coolant and a single air exit temperature.
See details of these and other updates in the Flow Simulator 2024 release notes.