Mentor Graphics announces Flowmaster thermal analysis tool with new capabilities

USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. announced several new capabilities for its Flowmaster simulation software solution for thermo-fluid systems.

From concept through design, optimization, and validation, the Flowmaster products are used at every stage of development so that engineers can minimize design effort to accurately simulate fluid flow and thermal analysis of their end-products. The latest release contains several significant features for pre-processing, simulation, data management, and design collaboration.

The new Flowmaster “experiments” capability harnesses the power of robust simulation within an exploratory methodology. It allows users to create response surfaces and export meta-model data as either standard ANSI C code or as S-Functions for use in a real-time environment providing support for hardware-in-the-loop simulations.

Using a Latin Square algorithm helps users generate unique combinations of distributed input values between specific bounds. This ability creates an ideal foundation for designing experiments, and the creation of meta-models and response surfaces that characterize a Flowmaster system response.

“Our ‘experiments’ features in the new Flowmaster release continue to provide our customers with the ability to conduct superior ‘what-if’ analysis for fluid flow simulations,” stated Erich Buergel, GM of the Mentor Graphics Mechanical Analysis Division. “The ability to export Flowmaster models as C code or S-Functions allows us to support systems engineers performing system level testing of embedded systems in real-time environments.”

Additionally, Monte Carlo simulations can be performed to produce simulation results based on a probability distribution generated from a mean and standard deviation for selected input parameters. This allows the effect of small variations in input values to be examined and allows the Flowmaster product to be used in risk analysis and quality control environments such as Design for Six Sigma (DFSS).

With this latest release, systems engineers can now implement an integrated native 1D-3D solution by leveraging the power of the Flowmaster and FloEFD products. Computational Sciences Expert Group (CSEG) provides simulation services to automotive and aerospace OEMs by providing predictive analytical capability in the product design cycle.

“With an increasing push towards analysis led design where simulation is required to provide design guidance before the prototypes are available, there is a strong need to characterize component performance data from CAD and design requirements,” said Sudhi Uppuluri, principal investigator at Computational Sciences Expert Group.

“Having access to the tightly coupled, general purpose 1D-3D CFD simulation of Flowmaster and FloEFD will enable us to characterize the more complex components of a system in 3D and insert those characteristics into the 1D system level models for simulation, thereby taking advantage of higher accuracy for components and minimizing the computational resources and execution times at a system level.”

Additional capabilities found in this latest Flowmaster product release, targeting aerospace and automotive systems design applications, include:

* Improved thermal bridge for heat transfer analysis, which automatically recognizes the transition between different flow regimes.
* Dynamic journal bearing based on the popular Booker and Martin modeling for fluid flow analyses.
* Advanced heat exchangers used to predict pressure drop and heat duty for single phase, cross-flow, compact heat exchangers.
* Traceable data management for project sharing and effective project management.