The Power of Automation
STAR-CCM+ V4.04’s automation capabilities provide a stress free path from geometry import to engineering simulation results. For generations of engineers who built careers and reputations on mastering the “blood, sweat and tears” approach to Computational Aided Engineer (manually generating computational meshes for complex industrial geometries), this can seem a little disconcerting, however automation has good news here too:

“The overriding goal of automation is to free engineers from the repetitive routine tasks associated with preparing and running simulations, allowing them to focus their time analyzing engineering results and generating a constant stream of useful information to guide the design process, ultimately resulting in more innovative, better engineered, products,” says Ercolanelli.

“By adopting this philosophy not only it is it possible to do more upfront engineering at a lower cost, but also allows simulation in becoming even more pervasive, being used at every stage of the engineering process, and spreading CAE benefits in all levels of industry.”

Power Session
Combined with low cost computing, CD-adapco’s Power Session licensing scheme (which allows users to exploit unlimited computer resources), the power of automation helps to free the design process from the traditional iterative design-test-build loop, allowing engineers to simultaneously investigate multiple design variants, and ultimately explore the whole design space, rather than a few selected points.

Powerful new features
Each new release of STAR-CCM+, provides a range of new pre and post processing capabilities, solver enhancements and the inclusion of additional validated physics models.

• Automatic meshing: the already powerful automatic meshing capability is further enhanced with the introduction of an automated wake refinement tool, which locally increases the mesh resolution based on the shape of a body, and allows greater accuracy of external flow without time-consuming setup procedures.
• Thermal Comfort Management Wizard: A new dedicated wizard for setting up occupant thermal comfort studies designed in collaboration with CD-adapco’s partners in the transportation industry. The Thermal Comfort Manager wizard accounts for human body properties to asses passenger comfort.
• Harmonic Balance Method: The implementation of the revolutionary harmonic balance method for the solution of periodically repeating turbulent flows enables the study of unsteady effects in rotating machinery with computational time scales that are drastically reduced compared to traditional transient methodologies.
• Eulerian Multiphase: STAR-CCM+ V4.04 also builds on its multiphase modeling including the first instance of the Eulerian multiphase model, non-newtonian VOF and improvements in the Lagrangian technique including droplet freezing and multicomponent droplet evaporation.
• Real Gas Effects: The introduction of real gas effects further enhances STAR-CCM+’s pedigree in the aerospace industry allowing accurate simulation of hypersonic flows.