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By Thierry Marchal, FIDAP Product Market Manager
Work on FIDAP 8.7 has recently been completed,
with a release currently scheduled
for Fall 2002. In addition to major
solver enhancements, FIDAP 8.7 will include several
new models along with features that
improve its usability.
Among the new models is one that allows mass transfer across a free surface.
This means that evaporation from a liquid surface can now be simulated.
The initial implementation of this capability makes use of a deforming
mesh, where the flux of material across the free surface is regulated
by a thermodynamic equilibrium between the two materials. A new “reduced
order” shell element has also been implemented in FIDAP 8.7. Designed
to complete the range of applications first addressed by the membrane
element introduced in FIDAP 8.6, useful for thin structures, the new shell
element has bending resistance, making it more suitable for simulations
involving fluidstructure interaction.
Temperature distribution in an aluminum extrusion, modeled using the FIDAP
8.7 P-coupled solver
Results visualized with FIELDVIEW™
In earlier versions of FIDAP, the database contained
all of the information for a given case, including
the mesh and problem parameters. In FIDAP
8.7, the user has the option of storing the mesh
information in a separate file, which means that
time will no longer be needed to store and retrieve
this information from the database. This option
will be very helpful for simulations that use large
meshes with hundreds of thousands (or more)
elements.
For problems involving “slip elements” or free
surface computation, a new method of defining
the normal and tangential directions has been
implemented in FIDAP 8.7. The computation of
normals on the faces of elements is performed
automatically, so that users no longer need to do
this manually at corners and edges.
A partially coupled solver has been introduced
in FIDAP 8.7 that offers an option that falls between
the fully coupled and segregated solvers. This
option allows the user to solve some degrees of
freedom (as selected by the user) in a coupled
fashion, while the other quantities are solved
in a segregated way. For certain applications (such
as low Reynolds number flows with non-
Newtonian viscosity), tests have demonstrated
that partial coupling of some quantities (such
as pressure and velocity) increases the convergence
rate. The degree of speed-up depends strongly
on the complexity of the physical models
involved.
Requests from users over the years to improve
the post-processing capabilities of FIDAP have led
to a partnership between Fluent and Intelligent
Light to bundle a special version of FIELDVIEW™
with FIDAP (and POLYFLOW). This new bundling
brings dramatic improvements to the ability to
visualize solution results. FIPOST will continue to
be available as well.
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