The first thing to understand is that the whole system is built into and takes place within CATIA V5 — there are no external applications. This means that it’s built to both take advantage of the existing simulation and analysis tools already within CATIA V5 and to extend their use for a CFD workflow. As such, if you’re familiar with CATIA V5, then the starting point for any review, the interface, will be immediately familiar. The Fluent for CATIA tools are found within the analysis and simulation application group.

Fluent has taken the existing CATIA structural analysis tools and enhanced them with its own technology. An excellent example is the mesh that CATIA produces. For quick simulation runs, the CATIA-generated tetrahedral mesh will suffice; if you’re looking to gain accurate CFD results, a basic tetrahedral mesh won’t cut the mustard, particularly at the outer boundaries and walls. A quality CFD mesh uses several layers of extruded elements to form the boundary layer, from which the rest of the mesh is built (this method kicks in once if the quality slider is at more than 75%). Another Fluent meshing enhancement is handling small gaps that the standard CATIA mesh might ignore. Here, CFD tools ensure that small gaps are meshed with a sufficient number of cells.

This is the flow volume, either modeled from scratch or using the pre-existing tools to extract the data from the product model. The Fluent for CATIA workflow is built directly into the V5 interface, with entities within the PPR tree (to the left) and with its own workbench (to the right).

Total pressure shaded and superimposed on the mesh.