For many engineers, Ansys 2022 R1 will be significant—but not revolutionary or evolutionary.
Disclosure: Shawn Wasserman is a former employee of Ansys Inc. who owns minor Ansys company stock.
The latest release of Ansys 2022 R1 includes new tools and technologies aiming to help engineers collaborate and streamline workflows within specific industries. For instance, it includes new industry dedicated workspaces for Ansys Fluent and Ansys Forming.
The optional new look for Ansys Fluent is designed to help users in the aerospace industry work on external aerodynamic solutions. The changes to Ansys Forming are meant to help engineers simulate the design and validation of the sheet metal forming process used within the automotive, appliance, aerospace and packaging industries. Finally, Ansys RF Advisor On Demand can be used by engineers to account for radio frequency interference in electronic devices.
Jayaraman Raghuraman, senior vice president of Schneider Electric, said about the release, “Schneider Electric leverages Ansys simulation to accelerate key business initiatives, improving the quality of our products while making them smarter. This is an enabler of our vision for a more sustainable, energy-efficient future. Ansys expertise and cutting-edge technology accelerates our digital transformation and helps us simplify the application landscape across our engineering organization.”
Other improvements in Ansys 2022 R1 include an introduction to:
- Phi Plush meshing technology to speed up and improve the robustness of 3D IC simulations.
- RedHawk-SC SigmaDVD which cuts down the analysis time of worst-case dynamic voltage-drops in semiconductors.
- A semi-automated workflow for Ansys Sherlock that utilizes integrations with Ansys AEDT Icepak.
Pascal Schirmer, development engineer for Power Electronics at BMW Group, said “The importance of electronics is continuously increasing in the automotive industry. The use of simulation tools from Ansys, such as Ansys Sherlock, allows us to optimize, in a very early design phase, the performance and reliability of the electronic components while managing for the growing complexity.”
Another family of tools seeing increased functionality in 2022 R1 are the optical technologies of Ansys Lumerical (for microscale), Ansys Zemax (for macroscale) and Ansys Speos (for human and sensor perception). Ansys STK (Systems Tool Kit), which is used to simulate objects in space, can now assess large satellite mega-constellations that are being studied throughout the space industry.
Many applications within Ansys 2022 R1 can also take better advantage of high-performance computing through Ansys Cloud support and GPU processing. One example is a multi-GPU solver within Fluent that speeds up the simulation of steady-state CFD models. Ansys notes that in this situation, four high-end GPUs had similar performance to 1,000 CPUs and reduced hardware costs by a factor of seven and power consumption by a factor of 4.
On a similar note, Ansys Discovery has thermal management improvements in the form of coupled fluid-solid multiphysics simulations. The aim of this is to improve the speed of assessments and design explorations for heat exchangers, liquid cooling devices and exhaust systems.
Shane Emswiler, senior vice president of products at Ansys, said, “Speed, fidelity and scalability are crucial to integrating simulation across the enterprise, enabling engineers to connect with global collaborators to keep pace with innovation in high-growth areas such as autonomous vehicles, electrification and artificial intelligence. The new features in Ansys 2022 R1 enable engineers to both solve more complex challenges and expand the reach of simulation’s benefits.”
A Final Take on Ansys 2022 R1
It’s hard to deny that the currently available news on Ansys 2022 R1 reads more like a Bill of Materials than a cohesive message about the software, the industry or the engineering space. As a result, this new release feels more like a version.X than a version.0. There is nothing wrong with version.X releases, they are important to solve security issues and add features that weren’t fully baked for version.0. However, this feels like the introduction to Ansys 2022 RX.
As a counterpoint, it’s easy to note the one big shift in direction that signifies the change of COMSOL 5.0 to 6.0—the focus changed from simulation apps towards producing a collaborative enterprise tool. But as for the big shift signaling Ansys 2021 RX from Ansys 2022 RX, that’s difficult to see.
In short, if the release has a new feature for a familiar workflow, then it will probably translate into a significant improvement for whatever organizations uses it. However, for many engineers 2022 R1 will be incremental—not revolutionary or evolutionary.
