Fidelity CFD
Cadence® Fidelity™ CFD Software is all-inclusive for meshing, solving, and post-processing. It carries industry-defining solver technology for fluid flow applications like turbomachinery, aerodynamics, and combustion physics.
OVERVIEW
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is an aspect of multiphysics system analysis that undertakes the simulation of the behavior of fluids and their thermodynamic properties using numerical models. In the case of Cadence’s robust CFD suite, this includes application areas such as propulsion, aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, and combustion. What makes CFD platforms pivotal is their ability to adapt to specific instances of additional physical phenomena.
Go beyond second-order of accuracy with the new Fidelity High-Order Solver. Click below to request a demo license and make sure to include ‘High-Order’ as an additional interest. Our sales team will contact you with the latest and greatest.
Flow
To solve complex flow equations, highly accurate meshing and geometries are needed to provide input for efficient numerical methods. Our exceptional CFD simulation software provides CFD meshing, solving, and post-processing, and is compatible with external CFD workflows. The computational world is due for an update to computational methodologies, and the update is universal product suites.
After you have meshed your model, the physics of the real-world environment can be solved to your desired fidelity. Thankfully, we have access to plenty of application-specific workflows from our decades of software development to improve efficiency or fidelity. These application-specific workflows include but are not limited to propulsion, aerodynamics, acoustic, and other needs.
Determining what tools, equations, and models you want to use in CFD is an essential step in the overall simulation process.
Features
Computational fluid dynamics has long been a field where individuals create the algorithms, tools, and solutions they need in order to solve the specific problems they’re experiencing. It isn’t enough these days to think product design in individual components when there are so many readily available tools to create a unified approach.
With high-order, aerodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid flow mechanics at the core of so many unique industries these days—aerospace, energy production, and automotive to name a few—it is no surprise to see CFD continuing to rise in importance. Below, you can see where we excel in some of the more standout categories of CFD.
Cadence employs a history of exploration across its technology domains. Whether this means industry-setting EDA optimization technology, massively-parallelized matrix solving for our multiphysics analysis, or now in High-Order for CFD. One of the largest difficulties in every simulation software is the balance between accuracy and speed. For CFD, this balance is typically narrated between mesh size and the order of accuracy for its solvers. As we continue to approach greater demands for accuracy, mesh cell counts are reaching the billions which drastically reduces efficiency and slows product design cycles.
Aerodynamics is a particularly common application for CFD. Calculating drag, lift, and stall angle, while including effects of turbulence, laminar-turbulent transition, and boundary layers, as well as wind tunnel conditions, is necessary. We pride ourselves on both our internal and external aerodynamics solutions.
The physical phenomenon of heat flux due to temperature differences, and its interaction with the fluid flow is known as Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT). Simply put, heat transfer analysis is looking at conduction, convection, and radiation to determine the ways in which energy is transferred. Applying heat transfer simulations and modeling in CFD models means opening an entire world of heat management possibilities.
Acoustics continuously gains in importance with the increase in power and noise generation in machinery. In aero- and vibro-acoustics, CFD methods like noise propagation, radiation, and fluid-structure coupling are all relevant and involved in solving processes. With the reliable and comprehensive non-linear harmonic (NLH) method, you can simultaneously calculate near-field propagation and noise source of turbomachinery tone noise.
Industry Solutions
Because fluids and fluid-structure interaction are in just about any system available, CFD simulations are at work in most industries. Some of the key industries where CFD is relevant are marine, commercial and military aerospace, automotive, biomedical, and petrochemical, as well as processing and chemical industries.
External aerodynamics and turbomachinery have long been a fundamental component of the automotive industry simulation challenge. These days, aerodynamics, propulsion, and combustion, as well as thermal exchangers for engine efficiency, water particle tracking, acoustic noise modeling, and flow interactions with structural mechanics all contribute vitally to the overall health of an automotive vehicle. Having specialized solvers to tackle any of these potential issues is vital for a more comprehensive simulation profile within your automotive systems.
The challenge of aerospace CFD is connected to the modeling of turbulence (and transition). The current widely used approach is based on Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models, where all properties are averaged over the turbulent fluctuations spectra. This requires the addition of turbulence models based on additional semi-empirical transport equations for relevant turbulent quantities, such as kinetic energy, dissipation, or turbulent eddy viscosity.
We’ve come a long way from water wheels yet transferring energy between a rotor and a fluid is still the base mechanism behind the concept of turbomachinery. Simulating flows in turbines, compressors, fans, propulsion mechanics, compressible, and incompressible flows are all significant parts of CFD for turbomachinery.
Resistance, propulsion, seakeeping, maneuvering, and wind study. These five pillars of CFD analysis for marine applications are inescapable, and Cadence has no intention of fleeing from them. CFD engineers can rely on CFD modelling for multiphase flow calculations, highly-optimized automation, and robust free surface resolution capacity in Fidelity Marine. Additionally, Cadence maintains benefits like automated trim optimization to improve fuel efficiency, large-scale simulation automation, and built-in calculations for EEXI adherence.
As health technologies advance into more careful and calculated domains of bodily control, so too does the need for advanced and accurate simulation and modeling. Where CFD takes place in the human anatomical structure is typically through its vascular structures and blood flow. Learning and replicating behaviors of blood flow using methods within CFD, such as studying fluid-structure interactions, turbulence modeling, and particle tracking, all enable a greater ability to resolve critical bodily challenges.
Technologies
The wonder of technology is how quickly it evolves. This applies to both the products being designed and the software to design them. But the nature of these evolutions is that sometimes we are using our tools to experiment and answer the questions that nobody has asked yet. Keep looking forward with tomorrow’s services and needs to create the next great advancement. With CFD software maturation, you can bring CFD earlier and earlier in the product design lifecycle.
Fluid flows can be either laminar or turbulent. Generally, laminar flows occur with slow moving fluids or particularly viscous fluids with parallel fluid layers with no eddies or currents to the flow. Understanding the physics of the flow is paramount for high degrees of accuracy regarding flow domains and characteristic lengths.
Air resistance is a representation of the force expressed by drag coefficients in the aerodynamics world. Effectively, air resistance, or drag, refers to opposing forces to the motion of an object moving through air. Since drag operates against the motion of the system, its force must be fought against by the system (typically through an acceleration force).
Historically, capturing shocks with CFD has been a major achievement. Most commercial aircraft are operating at subsonic speeds with transonic flow behavior along the wing suction side, reaching Mach numbers up to 1.3 and returning to subsonic speeds through a shock wave. An omnipresent and growing interest field is the field of hypersonic equipment, weaponry, and aircraft.
While the Venturi effect is a fairly common and simple physical phenomenon in the broader scheme of CFD, it can have grand impact in the fluid flow of engines, joints, and tubing. The Venturi effect is such that within an environment with constant mechanical energy, fluid velocity when moving through a narrower or constrained area or chokepoint will increase and relative static pressure decreases for subsonic flows, whereas at supersonic flows the effect is reversed.
Using wall functions, a Y+ calculator helps in modeling near wall regions for fluid flow. Use wall functions to bridge between wall and fully turbulent regions. This capacity helps to save time, as well as save computational resources in size of mesh as well as the total computational domain.
The Y+ calculator is available on iOS and Android and is a pain-free way to calculate wall distance in CFD simulations. Fluid flow here and around walls can be complicated phenomenon otherwise. These approximations and calculations enable an impression of the fluid flow domain for near-wall behavior.
Resources
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