Empowering Engineers: Ansys Launches Portal for Simulation App Development

Ansys offers easy access to the relevant tools and resources to produce simulation apps.

Disclosure: Shawn Wasserman is a former employee of Ansys Inc. who owns minor Ansys company stock.

In late 2021, Ansys dipped its toes into the realm of open-source by offering access to PyAnsys, a family of Python scripts available on GitHub which could interface with the proprietary stack of the Ansys portfolio. Today, the simulation giant is looking to nurture the developer community that has sprung from PyAnsys by releasing the Ansys Developer portal. The portal will link engineers to libraries of APIs, documentation, expert interactions, forums, developer tools, examples, tips/tricks, webinars and blogs to help improve the developer experience.

The launch of the Ansys Developer portal is designed to help nurture the developer community of PyAnsys. (Image courtesy of Ansys.)

The launch of the Ansys Developer portal is designed to help nurture the developer community of PyAnsys. (Image courtesy of Ansys.)

“The Ansys Developer portal will bring our developer tools and enablement together, into a single environment for collaboration, shared learning and innovation,” said Shane Emswiler, senior vice president of products at Ansys. “With this platform, we can grow and nurture Ansys’ developer ecosystem and greatly improve the experience by providing easier access to relevant tools, resources and technical support.”

The aim will be to further extend and democratize the Ansys workflow and portfolio by offering developers a one-stop-shop for all the information needed to develop homebrew Ansys solutions and apps. The hope is that these apps will help to automate the production of complex simulations and democratize the technology. In effect, the simulation experts can wrap a tool—and safeguards—around the Ansys technology so that non-experts can better use these tools.

“Ansys’ robust ecosystem of developer tools empowers our engineers to automate shared workflows, combine different tools and democratize simulation for all team members to use,” said Jakob Harming, a lead system simulation engineer at Danfoss. “Having access to Ansys tools provides us with a common framework to easily create apps, set up and run simulations and create reports. Additionally, having to learn only Python is a huge advantage since most graduates have a basic understanding of it.”

Why Engineers Should Care

For far too long, engineers have had few options when it came to the development of simulation apps. COMSOL is a leader in the space and niche simulation apps like CENOS have proven that there is a market for democratized simulation tools. But traditionally, if there wasn’t a simulation app available for the task at hand, and if you didn’t have access to COMSOL to make one yourself, then the traditional complex simulation tools available were the only options.

Much like COMSOL did in the past, Ansys is moving into this simulation app space to help its community of users create their own bespoke tools for their simulation needs. In theory, this could make the Ansys portfolio accessible to non-simulation experts, knocking the technology off its ivory tower.

Written by

Shawn Wasserman

For over 10 years, Shawn Wasserman has informed, inspired and engaged the engineering community through online content. As a senior writer at WTWH media, he produces branded content to help engineers streamline their operations via new tools, technologies and software. While a senior editor at Engineering.com, Shawn wrote stories about CAE, simulation, PLM, CAD, IoT, AI and more. During his time as the blog manager at Ansys, Shawn produced content featuring stories, tips, tricks and interesting use cases for CAE technologies. Shawn holds a master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Guelph and an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.