ANSYS unveils release 17.0

Simulation has been identified as one of the key pillars of the next industrial revolution, known as Industry 4.0. With the advent of the IoT all products are getting smarter, new advanced materials are enabling lighter, stronger and more sustainable designs, and additive manufacturing enables users to 3D print anything they can imagine. Unlocking the power of these trends is impossible without simulation tools’ ability to virtually explore these vastly increased options to arrive at the winning designs of tomorrow.

“Companies are under relentless pressure to create top-line growth and increase savings,” said Jim Cashman, President and CEO, ANSYS. “Innovation, time to market, operational efficiency and product quality are key factors that contribute to this business success. ANSYS is focused on helping customers improve their critical business metrics and leapfrog the competition by improving their product development process through engineering simulation. When we set out to develop the next release of our simulation platform, we challenged ourselves to improve our customers’ product development process by a full order of magnitude, or 10x.”    

“Hyperloop Technology is accomplishing safe and reliable ground transportation at close to the speed of sound,” said Josh Giegel, Vice President of design and analysis, Hyperloop Technologies. “ANSYS 17.0 technology offers deeper insight into our designs and enables us to make the necessary improvement to our development process, which in turn will help us realise the Hyperloop concept."

“ANSYS has been an acknowledged leader in enabling simulation-driven design over the past several decades, and ANSYS 17.0 release is a major step forward in terms of bringing together all of the ANSYS modeling and simulation capabilities required to achieve the vision of an integrated yet open enterprise product innovation platform driven by behavior modeling and simulation,” said Peter Bilello, President, CIMdata. “As industry moves ahead over the next decade to realise the vision and promised benefits of Model-Based Systems Engineering in the context of mega-trends such as the IoT, Industry 4.0 and the Circular Economy, ANSYS' product portfolio and M&S platform is well positioned to meet the multi-domain requirements for developing complex cyber-physical systems with ever increasing levels of software and electronics content.”

Highlights of the release include:

10x Improvements to Productivity. ANSYS 17.0 delivers solutions faster so engineers and designers can make more informed decisions sooner in the product development cycle. That enables organisations to rapidly innovate and bring products to market faster, while getting more productivity from their existing engineering assets.

Through tighter integration of semiconductor and electronics simulation solutions, ANSYS 17.0 delivers a comprehensive chip-package-system design workflow. New capabilities for automated thermal analysis and integrated structural analysis deliver an unequalled chip-aware and system-aware simulation solution, enabling customers to deliver smaller, higher-power density devices to market faster. With the advent of the IoT, more products and engineers will rely on these capabilities.

In the fluids suite, ANSYS continues its technology leadership with breakthrough advancements in physics modeling and introduces new innovations across the entire workflow and user environment design to accelerate time to results by up to 85% without compromising accuracy. Improvements to workflow and meshing enable novice users to quickly become productive while new tools and options expand the application reach for experienced users.

“ANSYS has broken through by truly integrating multi-domain 3D meshed solutions,” said Brad Kramer, director of engineering at HUSCO International. “By closely integrating the fluid and the mechanical interfaces, we are now able to simulate and gain insight into the real physics of the problem without having to set up artificial boundary conditions.”

Preprocessing – or the act of setting up simulations – with ANSYS 17.0 has also improved by an order of magnitude. Using the direct modeling tools in ANSYS 17.0, users can prepare their geometry for analysis faster than traditional computer-aided design (CAD). Save and load times for complex models, as well as the performance for common geometry editing functions has increased by up to 100 times. ANSYS 17.0 geometry tools also boast tighter integration to ANSYS Workbench and offer many productivity advancements for modeling fabricated and composite structures. Fluids pre-processing for complex systems has also improved dramatically. The process of preparing and meshing models with hundreds of parts has been reduced from days to hours with ANSYS 17.0. 

ANSYS 17.0 enables software engineers to be more productive with developing, testing and certifying embedded software. New industry-specific vertical solutions take full benefit from the openness and flexibility of the platform to facilitate interactions with original equipment manufacturers and suppliers while adhering to such industry standards as ARINC 661/664, FACE and AUTOSAR.

10x Improvements for Deeper Insight. ANSYS 17.0 delivers deeper insight into real-world product performance through such enhancements as higher fidelity simulations and better post processing. For example, with PCBs, engineers can now quickly import ECAD geometry and perform coupled thermal-structural analysis with power integrity and electronics cooling analyses to accurately predict stress, deformation and fatigue. These capabilities enable engineers to design board layouts and thermal management strategies for more reliable electronic components. As a result, complex board and packages can be set up and solved in minutes, not hours or days.

As products become more complex, the ability to simulate entire systems provides a significant advantage to manufacturers. Using a single simulation platform at ANSYS 17.0, engineers can not only simulate physical models but can also consider embedded systems design and embedded software models. This enables virtual systems simulation, testing and prototyping, reducing product development time and cost.

In this release, ANSYS introduces native support for the industry-standard system modeling language, Modelica, which enables access to hundreds of additional mechanical and fluid component models in addition to its rich model library for power electronics. At the same time, advancements in the platform provide more insight to real world system performance by enabling high-fidelity 3D results to be incorporated into system-level models.

ANSYS 17.0 greatly expands turbomachinery simulation capabilities across a broad spectrum to produce highly accurate results, across a wider array of operating conditions and with shorter turnaround time. Engineers can solve considerably more transient blade row configurations by calculating as few as one blade per row instead of the full wheel to speed time to solution by over 10x and drastically reducing the required computing resources. These advances are critical given that turbines produce 99% of the world’s electricity.

10x Improvements to Performance. ANSYS 17.0 delivers performance improvements for all of its product lines, particularly in the realm of high-performance computing (HPC). ANSYS 17.0 introduces the most modern HPC solver architectures that leverages the latest processor technologies. Organisations can leverage this power on most IT configurations – from desktops to cloud environments – to obtain their simulation results sooner.

There is a clear global demand to develop more power efficient machines, but progress has been hindered due to the huge computational resources required to simulate an electric machine. Complete transient electromagnetic field analysis of an electric machine can require two weeks or more to complete. HPC advances in the ANSYS 17.0 electromagnetics suite deliver unprecedented computational speed for full transient electromagnetic field simulation for electric motor design. Simulations of critical transient behaviors that previously required weeks of computational time can now be completed in hours during early design stages, reducing the risk of project delays and late-stage design changes.

“This is amazing technology,” said Briam Cavalca Bork, Product Engineer, WEG. “ANSYS 17.0 allows us to fully utilise our HPC hardware. Simulation time has improved by a factor of 20x, but more importantly we have gained more in-depth and timely design insight that will allow us to deliver industry leading, innovative machine designs. The ANSYS technology delivers the capability to do more complex analyses on a greater variety of scenarios.”

As previously announced, ANSYS fluids solutions have smashed the previous simulation world record by scaling to 129,000 compute cores running at 90% efficiency – a 10x improvement over the past two years. HPC performance of the structures suite has also improved significantly and now demonstrates scaling up to 1000 cores. Structural simulations which required running overnight, can now be completed in an hour, enabling engineers to explore 10x more variations and find the best design faster.

“Organisations across a wide variety of industries are struggling to keep pace with the growing need for data-intensive modeling and large-scale simulations to accelerate business innovation,” said Scott Misage, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “By bringing together all high-performance computing (HPC) advances made in the new ANSYS 17 release with our industry-leading HPE Apollo compute platform for HPC and big data workloads, our customers can now transform their product development processes, reduce engineering costs and accelerate time-to-market.”

“Our partnership with ANSYS has always equipped us with exceptional simulation capabilities, which have allowed us to design and develop our cars more quickly, efficiently and intelligently,” said Nathan Sykes, head of numerical tools and technologies, Red Bull Racing and Technology. “The ANSYS 17.0 fluids suite has been used extensively in the design of our 2016 challenger, the RB12, allowing us to conduct critical CFD analysis and make design decisions faster than ever before.”