The future of particle interaction simulations is bright for engineers, ESSS and Ansys.
Disclosure: Shawn Wasserman is a former employee of Ansys Inc. who owns minor Ansys company stock.
Ansys and ESSS have upgraded their partnership in recent weeks with the announcement of Ansys Rocky. But how does this bulk granular material and particle interaction simulation tool differ from ESSS’s Rocky DEM? And what does this all mean for Ansys and ESSS users?
To answer these questions, I sat down with Jeremy McCaslin, manager of fluids product management at Ansys, and Clovis Maliska Jr., president and CEO at ESSS, to get the record straight.
Bulk Granular Material Flow Simulation with Rocky
Bulk granular material flow simulations study particle dynamics. Effectively, they answer how particles interact with each other and how they interact with other geometries, fluids, electromagnetic fields and more.
Maliska explained to me that Rocky DEM was designed to be more than just a particle simulator. It’s a multiphysics, high-fidelity particle dynamics simulator that can also handle various particle shapes.
“You are actually taking into account things like the true particle shape when you’re doing your collision detection and then your force calculation. But not only your force calculation. It can be heat transfer calculation. It can be mass transfer species calculations,” he said. “It’s all about modeling the fundamental physical behavior of particles—not only interacting with particles themselves but with other physics as well.”
In summary, Rocky enables engineers to input STL files of a triangulated surface. It can then compute the collision between particles of that shape with neighboring particles. The software can compute where the particles touched and overlapped, as well as the force between them. But handling these custom shapes isn’t the only thing that sets Rocky apart form other Discrete Element Method (DEM) software. It also enables the assessment of heat transfer, magnetic fields and other multiphysics interactions.
McCaslin compared Rocky’s ability to work with various particle shapes to traditional DEM software that typically treat particles as spheres.
“If you’re like me, then you don’t think of a fiber of hair, or a [clipping] of grass as a particle, right? But as far as Rocky is concerned, they’re the same. So not only can it handle true particle shape; it can handle complex 3D shapes,” McCaslin explained. “It can also handle 2D shells that can be flexible or rigid, and it can handle fibrous material. That’s why I like to get away from the word particle and focus on discrete element. Almost any discrete noncontinuous, noncontiguous type of material that you can imagine, Rocky can accommodate.”
A Tale of Two Rockies: Ansys and ESSS
So, if you already have access to Rocky DEM, do you need Ansys Rocky?
Afterall, Rocky DEM is compatible with one-way and two-way coupled simulations with Ansys technology. It also has been fully integrated with Ansys Workbench for some time. So, what’s the difference? Maliska and McCaslin explained that there aren’t that many differences. However, they stress this shouldn’t limit user excitement.
McCaslin said, “[Between] Ansys Rocky and ESSS Rocky DEM, there is some slightly different product packaging, but in terms of the actual technology and the scope of problems that they can solve, they are exactly the same—they are identical.”
So, from a technology perspective, nothing is new. There is no need to upgrade and there are no plans from either Ansys or ESSS to differentiate the technologies. So, I asked the big question, “Why should users care?” The answer is twofold: not only does it simplify the sale of Rocky to Ansys users, but this added collaboration—and its anticipated explosion in Rocky usership—promises future usability improvements.
In the past, Ansys would refer customers to ESSS when they needed Rocky. Now, Ansys has something in its own portfolio list. So, the sales process is simplified, and tech teams are empowered to speak to Ansys users about the benefits of Rocky. Both realities should grow the usership.
McCaslin explained, “The more customers we have that are using Rocky, the more feedback we will have as to how we could improve it with respect to our other tools and how it couples with them. We will have much more field inputs to use to enhance the integration of these tools.”
So, how many new Rocky users are we talking about here? McCaslin answered, “I would say 70 percent of industrial products have bulk granular material movement needs.” Maliska interjected, “That’s the untapped potential.”
What Will Ansys Rocky Bring to the Portfolio?
Currently, Ansys technology doesn’t have a method to deal with the length scales that Rocky specializes in. McCaslin noted, “We don’t have a way of treating the bucket loader that’s scooping up gravel and the gravel itself within the same modeling framework. The same can be said for CFD examples. If you had, let’s say, a fluidized bed reactor.”
He added, “I mean, you could get a good idea of how your product is going to perform by neglecting those things, for certain types of products, but as we democratize simulation, the bar will be continually raised higher and higher.… Rocky adds major value to the core problems that Mechanical and Fluent are trying to solve.”
There is also a hidden advantage to the ESSS and Ansys partnership—the collaboration of a larger pool of experts who understand GPU processing. Rocky DEM and Ansys Discovery were both created from the ground up to use GPUs to compute their simulations.
“Existing traditional numerical methods, they are very well suited for CPU—not necessarily for GPU. So, we had to rethink everything,” Maliska said. “We needed more speed. We needed to be able to handle more particles and faster, and the key ingredient here was GPU.”
The Rocky and Discovery R&D teams will share their knowledge and collaborate on how to get the most computational power out of a GPU. As these teams continue to work together, users can expect more improvements to both Discovery and Rocky.
However, Maliska and McCaslin did note that there is currently no official overlapping code exchange or interaction between the two software options.
The Future of Ansys Rocky and ESSS
So, what does this partnership mean for the relationship between Ansys and ESSS?
McCaslin explained, “At Ansys, we have software partners and we have business partners. Of those two, ESSS is both. They are our business partner in that they resell Ansys software. But they are also a technology partner in that their technology couples with our technology. That was the status that they’ve had up until this year. This year, that’s been taken a step further because now this product can be sold off the Ansys price list. So, that takes it to the level of an OEM or distribution agreement.”
ESSS still owns Rocky and will be in control of the development of the Ansys version of the software. But this still gives Ansys a new technology in its portfolio. This in of itself is interesting because over the past decade Ansys has had the strategy of acquiring its new technologies. This leads us to the next big question: Why was this not the case with ESSS and Rocky?
According to Ansys’ 2020 Annual Report, “We make targeted acquisitions in order to support our long-term strategic direction, accelerate innovation, provide increased capabilities to our existing products, supply new products and services, expand our customer base and enhance our distribution channels.”
So, let’s put speculation hats on. The fact that there is an announcement of a version of Rocky surrounded in Ansys branding speaks volumes. One of the most challenging parts of an acquisition is rebranding products to a new parent company. The fact that there is already going to be an Ansys Rocky while ESSS is still a separate company solves this conundrum before it’s a problem. It makes one wonder what acquisition options are in the future for ESSS.
