Altair® Flux® 2022.3 Release Highlights
Altair EmployeeLet’s have a look at the key features and improvements of Altair® Flux® 2022.3!
A lot of new features and improvements to bring speed and accuracy to your simulations with better workflows and better models.
ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPUTATIONS MADE EASY THROUGH SIMLAB
The integration of the Flux solver in Altair SimLab is accelerating, bringing each time new capabilities and easy-to-use workflows. A circuit builder is now available to define your own electric circuit to be connected to your EM transient computations. One nice thing is that you can also use pre-defined circuits coming from a catalog to accelerate the set-up. With the latest improvements of the 2D sketcher and the so-called “motor mesh” feature, you can really speed-up the modeling and meshing tasks for your electric motor simulations. A great step is that you can now run design of experiment studies using geometric or physical parameters. The evolution of electromagnetic responses with parameters can be looked at. For advanced mutliparametric studies, an export towards Hyperstudy is available. With the new version, you will also find tutorials which will guide you through the process of simulating actuators, axial machines, wound field machines and synchronous reluctance machines.
Complete electromagnetic workflow in SimLab
EXTRACTION OF PARASITICS FOR POWER ELECTRONICS DESIGN
Power converters are using always higher switching speeds in a search for more power density. It generates high-frequencies that have a big impact when interacting with the parasitic elements (R,L,C) of the power connections. Those parasitics need to be taken into account early in the design process of power modules, in order to avoid discovering performance or conducted EMI issues on the test bench. Altair SimLab integrates now a new solver that is able to evaluate them efficiently and accurately. It is able to compute S-parameters, plot them, and export in Spice and Touchstone formats for system simulation.
A new application for parasitic parameters extraction.
COMPLETE SIMULATION OF MOTOR DRIVES
The efficiency and the performance of an electric machine is directly linked to the power converter it is connected to and the control. This is why it is key to be able to simulate the system as a whole. In the latest version, you will find a new macro which is allowing to export tables that can be directly used by Activate or PSIM and perform such simulations. The typical usage will be to look at the impact of PWM on motor losses and motor noise or to compute the global efficiency map of the drive.
Flux look-up tables used in PSIM to get the global efficiency map of a PMSM associated to its inverter
You will find more information in the following article : Designing efficient and silent Motor Drives
EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF MECHANICAL STRESS ON MAGNETIC PERFORMANCE
Motor laminations are usually created using a stamping process that introduces mechanical stress. This stress affects the magnetic properties of the material and has a direct impact on the performance of motors. A new and easy-to-use model has been introduced in Flux to consider these effects. A stress-dependant magnetic behavior law can be defined and applied along the lines of magnetic regions. In this model, the local effect of punching can be taken into account, considering a rapid decay of the stress when moving away from the boundaries inside the matter.
Mechanical stress dependant B(H) characteristics and impact on EM behavior of a motor
GOING FURTHER WITH FREE SHAPE OPTIMIZATION
With free shape optimization, you don’t need to define parameters, but you just select the lines you want to let change freely to optimize your design. It is now available in standard more. Improvements have been brought from the first release of this feature, with quicker computations and the possiblity to have automated remeshing included in the process, allowing for more precise results and letting you go a step further in the optimization. A really new way to optimize electric motors, actuators or sensors !
60% weight reduction in less than one hour using free shape optimization
AND ALSO
- Improved process for easy distribution of parametric computations in Windows and Linux
- Guidelines provided to use parallel computing capabilities in the best way : How to use solver parallelization and parametric distribution with Flux?
Discover these improvements in more detail by looking at the Release Notes of Altair® Flux® 2022.3
You can also find the full documentation online:
Altair® Flux® can be downloaded on the Altair One Marketplace (with your account) here.
Enjoy Altair® Flux® 2022.3 version!
If you want to know more about Altair® FluxMotor® and its new features, look at the Release Notes.
Yann Le Floch - Senior Program Manager Flux®
Vincent Leconte - Senior Director of Global Business Development, Electromechanical Solutions