Officials at VTOL Technologies, of Wokingham, England, have said they’ve recently increased their drone design’s lift by 20 percent, reduced drag by 2 percent, and shaved four weeks off design time.
These savings were enabled by SimScale, of Munich, an online post processer that has recently been updated. VTOL used the post processor as part of its drone design.
VTOL’s drones are targeted at network-based linear asset industries for an automated and low-cost aerial asset inspection capability. The company’s flagship product is the VTOL Flying Wing.
The updated Simscale boasts a faster and more powerful mechanism for visualization and interrogation of simulation results, according to Simscale officials.
The new, online post-processor improves performance over the former version, including load speeds, visualization, and data manipulation. The experience now matches the robustness of desktop post-processing software with well-equipped hardware. This allows users to carry out quick sanity checks on product setup as well in-depth post-processing.
Users who are inspecting results can now query the value of a field at a certain location by clicking on that location. This ensures they gain a more complete understanding of the field without having to invest time into creating complicated visualizations. It’s also useful in many applications, including cutting through a heat source to understand surrounding temperatures, or getting a surface representation of a building in wind load to gain an understanding of surface pressures.
Iso-volumes and Iso surfaces can visualize a 3D object based upon a fields scalar value. This is done by either selecting a value to create an iso-surface or selecting a range of values to create an iso-volume. They can be used to visualize many applications, including thermal plumes above a heat source using temperature, or wing tip vortex using vorticity.
The animation feature allows the user to visualize a transient data set by choosing a start and end time as well as animation resolution. It also allows the user to visualize streamlines over time for steady state results.
The new post processor also has some enhancements to color maps, including the option to change between several different color schemes and the ability to choose how many color levels are seen. This helps when viewing multiple fields within the same visualization; for example, a surface pressure visualization can be presented using the traditional rainbow scheme, while streamlines colored by velocity can be visualized using the thermal scheme to offer a clear understanding of the results.
