“Efficiency is the critical criteria in making fluid flow simulation practical within a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment", comments Dr. Ivo Weinhold, manager, CFD Products for NIKA. “An effective program is an all encompassing one -- one which starts with the availability of CAD data for the geometry, continues through to the evaluation of the results for multiple scenarios, and finally presentation of the results. Through automation, NIKA has made every single step in this process as efficient as possible to enable even very complex simulation projects to keep pace with the typical design cycle.”

Version 5.0 Overview

Remote Solver Function: This function allows users to operate the solver separately from the pre- and postprocessor on different networked computers. It can increase productivity in several ways. Firstly, users can farm-out the analysis portion to a different computer. All the available memory can then be made available to the analysis run; thereby, enabling the user to simulate even larger models without requiring any additional investment in hardware resources. Secondly, it allows users to monitor the solution progress locally on the engineer’s workstation. This arrangement allows for a more efficient use of expensive hardware and increases the return on the company hardware investment. Users of EFD.V5 will find this feature especially helpful since the remote computer will not require CATIA V5 for operation. Therefore, the engineer can prepare multiple variants of the design on one computer while solving them on another.

Simplified Preprocessing: Numerous improvements for data input and model creation have been implemented which result in significant reduction of model set-up times. For instance, creating “Engineering Goals” is now almost completely automated and features may be copied between projects.

Automatic Results Processing: Version 5.0 of EFD.Lab and EFD.V5 introduce the automation of results, XY-plots and Engineering Goals reports. Users can now take advantage of a continuous automated process especially for projects that require a large number of simulation runs, such as computation of characteristic curves and parameter studies. The simulation results are processed according to the corporate identity standards of the user and saved as Microsoft® Office documents.

Fluid Flow Simulation as an Integral Part of PLM

EFD.Lab and EFD.V5 are based on the principles of Engineering Fluid Dynamics (EFD). EFD is a radically different approach from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). While based on the same mathematical foundation as CFD programs, EFD programs are not only powerful, but also extremely easy to use. EFD.Lab and EFD.V5 feature incompressible (liquid or gas) or compressible (gas) flows, laminar, turbulent, steady-state and transient flows, surface roughness, conjugated heat transfer, particle tracking, and many more physical models. EFD.Lab and EFD.V5 are mainly used for the development and optimization of various products such as automotive parts, computer housings, switching units, electronic devices, HVAC systems, valves and regulators, medical equipment, in addition to the building and fire protection industries. EFD.Lab includes a preprocessor with parametric solid modeling of the geometry, and a powerful postprocessor for easy processing and visualization of results. The preprocessor imports native CAD files from the most popular CAD systems and supports numerous standard file formats. EFD.V5 is seamlessly integrated into the PLM system CATIA V5. The CAD geometry of a design can be directly used without modeling a separate domain of the flow space. This unique feature combined with automatic mesh generation and solver convergence controls allow the engineer to take advantage of fully integrated flow simulation within the design cycle.

To find out more about the next generation in fluid flow analysis, please visit www.nika.biz.