What follows is a very brief summary of the key new features and in Version 9.0:

New Models

General Moving Objects. A new General Moving Object model allows users to model rigid body dynamics with six-degrees-of-freedom fully coupled with fluid flow. In the new model, an object (or multiple objects) can be allowed to move freely, or the user can prescribe the motion.

Thermal Stress Modeling. A thermal stress model, together with an implicit treatment of the stresses and an extension to two fluids, has been added. The model describes elastic stresses and deformations induced by cooling and solidification of metal parts.

Implicit GMRES Solver for pressure and velocity. A new pressure-velocity solver, generalized minimum residual method, has been added. In addition to the GMRES pressure solver, a new algorithm—the generalized conjugate gradient algorithm—has also been implemented for solving viscous terms implicitly, when used with the GMRES solver.

Electro-thermal (Joule heating) and Electro-mechanical effects. The ability to model these effects has been added to the electric field model.

Implicit Surface Tension. Users can now model surface tension effects implicitly.

Air Entrainment. Designed to model the entrainment of air into fluid due to turbulent mixing at the free surface, the new model takes into account turbulence in the fluid, gravity and surface tension.

Micro-porosity model. A new model for predicting micro-porosity in solidifying metal.

Drift-flux model additions. A non-linear (Reynolds number dependent) model has been developed for the calculation of the drift velocity, together with Richardson-Zaki correlation for closely packed dispersed material, and an inversion point (when continuous and dispersed phases change into the reverse configuration).

Major Improvements

Multi-Block Model. Improved mass conservation and diagnostics in the multi-block model. The coupling of pressures and velocities at inter-block boundaries has been significantly enhanced.

Advection. Numerous important improvements to FLOW-3D®’s VOF advection schema have been implemented.

Molecular diffusion between two fluids has been added.

Thermal die cycling. Convergence control of the implicit heat transfer solver has been optimized for faster performance. This includes setting the maximum allowed time step, based on the cycling segment durations, and relaxing convergence for the thermal cycles before the last one. This will make such calculations run at least two times faster or more depending on the number of cycles.

Graphical User Interface. The FLOW-3D® graphical user interface has been re-written from scratch using a cross-platform toolkit known as Qt®. This new GUI is a major improvement over prior incarnations in that it has built-in intelligence, more capabilities and is fully-integrated. Importantly, great effort was expended to ensure that the new GUI is backward compatible, so that users would not be required to make changes to input files in order to run them in the new GUI.

Flow Science has commenced shipment of the new release to customers under maintenance contracts.

Flow Science, Inc. is a privately held software company specializing in high fidelity fluid dynamics modeling software for industrial and scientific applications worldwide. Flow Science has Associates for FLOW-3D® sales and support in Japan, Germany, Korea, Finland, Norway, Russia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Spain, Italy, Canada, India and China.