Release includes a circuit editor, turbomachinery tools and surrogate models.
Recently, Siemens Digital Industries Software made Simcenter STAR-CCM+ 2021.1 available. Much of the announcement focused on the release’s cloud computing capabilities. But it also outlines some ease-of-use improvements that focus on turbomachinery, electromagnetics and design workflows.
Engineering.com reached out to the company’s experts to dig a little deeper into what users can expect from these improvements.
The piece of news that is likely to affect the greatest number of STAR-CCM+ users is that the software has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) High Performance Computing (HPC) Competency status. As a result, with AWS’s elastic and scalable cloud infrastructure, users can optimize the performance and efficiency of their HPC workloads.
Other big improvements include new:
- Turbomachinery post-processing tools
- Electric circuit editor
- Surrogate model functionality
STAR-CCM+ Achieves AWS HPC Competency Status
Current industry trends are pushing corporations to make their products more complex to help differentiate themselves from the competition. As this trend intensifies, especially in larger organizations, simulations will continue to expand past the current compute capacities offered by in-house computational resources.
By running simulations on the cloud, engineers can access near infinite compute capacity, enabling them to get results from complex simulations faster than ever before.
“Achieving AWS HPC status indicates our commitment to help engineers achieve the full potential of their designs through simulation,” said Deryl Snyder, vice president of Computational Continuum Mechanics at Siemens Digital Industries Software. “It provides confidence that when they leverage AWS for their computing needs, they will get the best Simcenter STAR-CCM+ performance possible. We work closely with other cloud platforms to provide the same confidence in performance and will continue to do so.”
Simulation isn’t just for large organizations anymore. Small- to medium-sized businesses are discovering that by utilizing cloud technology, they no longer need expensive in-house computational resources.
Snyder added, “Small businesses are also leveraging more simulation to create new and innovative products. It doesn’t make sense for them to build and maintain compute facilities. Cloud HPC is not only cost-effective; it allows them to be laser-focused on creating the best designs.”
By achieving AWS HPC status, Siemens will be able to expand the usage of STAR-CMM+ to smaller organizations and those looking to produce more complex designs.
New Turbomachinery Features for Gas Turbine Simulations and Beyond
Siemens explained that gas turbine simulations have been a key focus for STAR-CCM+. In fact, many of its recent releases have included new features that target this and other turbomachinery sectors.
As a result, it isn’t surprising to see two new features focusing on the post-processing of turbomachinery simulations.
Chad Custer, a Simcenter STAR-CCM+ product manager focusing on Turbomachinery, said, “A new circumferential averaging capability takes full-complexity simulation results and provides an averaged flow-path solution. This enables engineers and designers to easily identify main flow features and to correlate CFD results to lower-order methods used earlier in the design cycle.”
The second post-processing feature standardizes a common view of the solution known as the blade-to-blade section view. The blade-to-blade section is a curved 3D surface. The new embedding feature flattens that surface allowing for easier interpretation of the data and more consistent comparisons between designs.
These two-visualization tools enable engineers to gain better insights into their designs. They can easily correlate results to earlier design calculations and simplify the assessments of blade-to-blade simulations.
The release also includes a new boundary condition to simplify the analysis of compressors called the Outlet Corrected Mass Flow. Custer said, “The physics of a compressor changes significantly depending on the mass flow rate through the compressor. This new boundary condition is appropriate regardless of mass flow rate and simplifies the generation of the compressor speed line.”
Though these new features specifically target the gas turbine market, Siemens explains that they can be used in the design of various turbomachinery—from turbochargers to industrial compressors.
Visualize, Interpret and Simulate Circuits with the Electric Circuit Editor
The latest release of STAR-CCM+ includes an electric circuit editor capable of producing graphical representations of electronic components within a circuit model.
Angelo Limone, a Simcenter STAR-CCM+ product manager specializing in Electromagnetics, said, “The Editor can be used to build a circuit from scratch, starting from an empty canvas. It can also be used to visualize and interpret the topology of an existing circuit. Users have access to a library of common circuit elements (resistors, inductors, etc.), which they can place on the canvas with point-and-click action. Circuits drawn with the Circuit Editor can be easily coupled with the 2D or 3D field simulation.”
Currently, the editor doesn’t have supercomponent block functions, which could complicate the modeling of electronic systems with custom circuit parts.
The release also simplifies the modeling of electric machines by adding a new excitation coil model, which can help engineers design higher power density machines that include closed coils—like axial flux motors.
Limone said, “The user imposes the magnitude and direction of the electric current flowing in the excitation coil region (either as a boundary condition or with an appropriate arrow). Simcenter STAR-CCM+ then computes the corresponding magnetic field generated by the imposed current.”
Response Surface Models in Design Manager
Finally, the release mentions the use of surrogate models within Design Manager. Surrogate models, or response surface models (RSM), are metamodels created from design exploration studies.
Effectively, surrogate models take an existing database of simulated results and fit a mathematical model to the design space so that engineers can quickly predict the results of non-simulated designs.
Bahaa Haddoukessouni, a Simcenter STAR-CCM+ product manager who works on Design Manager, said, “Surrogate models, available in Simcenter STAR-CCM+, are the key solution to consider manufacturing tolerances in the design process in order to increase the robustness and reliability of high performing designs. By predicting thousands of variants locally around the design of interest, surrogate models compute sensitivities with respect to slight parameter changes, based on distributions and including constraints. This way, they help analyze the probability of failure of the design of interest to ensure confidence in results before moving to manufacturing.”
STAR-CCM+ has two methods to produce surrogate models:
- Least squares linear/quadratic: for local approximations
- Kriging and radial basis function: for interpolated data points and complex design spaces
Surrogate models, specifically RSM, have gained a lot of popularity due to the trend toward digital twins and increasingly complexity products. These 0D and 1D simulations are used to quickly characterize 3D components within the twin. This can have applications throughout a company’s workflows, from design to manufacturing and operations.
Haddoukessouni said, “Surrogate models also leverage any accumulated knowledge in the organization. Any existing database of results can be used and/or enriched to generate a surrogate model in order to quickly predict thousands of new variants.”
To learn more about STAR-CCM+, click here.