Today ANSYS announced that engineers across disciplines – from structures to fluids to electromagnetics to systems – will realize step-change improvements in the way they develop products using the newly released ANSYS 17.0. This next generation of ANSYS industry-leading engineering simulation solutions set the scene for the next quantum leaps in product development, enabling unprecedented advancements across an array of industry initiatives from smart devices to autonomous vehicles to more energy-efficient machines. The most feature-rich release in the company’s 45-year history, available today, delivers 10x improvements to product development productivity, insight and performance.
Simulation has been identified as one of the key pillars of the next industrial revolution, known as Industry 4.0. With the advent of the Internet of Things all products are getting smarter, new advanced materials are enabling lighter, stronger and more sustainable designs, and additive manufacturing enables users to 3-D print anything they can imagine. Unlocking the power of these trends is impossible without simulation tools’ ability to virtually explore these vastly increased options to arrive at the winning designs of tomorrow.
“Companies are under relentless pressure to create top-line growth and increase savings,” said Jim Cashman, president and CEO of ANSYS. “Innovation, time to market, operational efficiency and product quality are key factors that contribute to this business success. ANSYS is focused on helping customers improve their critical business metrics and leapfrog the competition by improving their product development process through engineering simulation. When we set out to develop the next release of our simulation platform, we challenged ourselves to improve our customers’ product development process by a full order of magnitude, or 10x.”
Highlights of the release include:
- 10x Improvements to Productivity. ANSYS 17.0 delivers solutions faster so engineers and designers can make more informed decisions sooner in the product development cycle. That enables organizations to rapidly innovate and bring products to market faster, while getting more productivity from their existing engineering assets.
- Through tighter integration of semiconductor and electronics simulation solutions, ANSYS 17.0 delivers a comprehensive chip-package-system design workflow. New capabilities for automated thermal analysis and integrated structural analysis deliver an unequalled chip-aware and system-aware simulation solution, enabling customers to deliver smaller, higher-power density devices to market faster. With the advent of the Internet of Things, more products and engineers will rely on these capabilities.
- In the fluids suite, ANSYS continues its technology leadership with breakthrough advancements in physics modeling and introduces new innovations across the entire workflow and user environment design to accelerate time to results by up to 85 percent without compromising accuracy. Improvements to workflow and meshing enable novice users to quickly become productive while new tools and options expand the application reach for experienced users.
ANSYS has broken through by truly integrating multi-domain 3-D meshed solutions,” said Brad Kramer, director of engineering at HUSCO International. “By closely integrating the fluid and the mechanical interfaces, we are now able to simulate and gain insight into the real physics of the problem without having to set up artificial boundary conditions.”
Preprocessing – or the act of setting up simulations – with ANSYS 17.0 has also improved by an order of magnitude. Using the direct modeling tools in ANSYS 17.0, users can prepare their geometry for analysis faster than traditional computer-aided design (CAD). Save and load times for complex models, as well as the performance for common geometry editing functions has increased by up to 100 times. ANSYS 17.0 geometry tools also boast tighter integration to ANSYS Workbench and offer many productivity advancements for modeling fabricated and composite structures. Fluids pre-processing for complex systems has also improved dramatically. The process of preparing and meshing models with hundreds of parts has been reduced from days to hours with ANSYS 17.0.
ANSYS 17.0 enables software engineers to be more productive with developing, testing and certifying embedded software. New industry-specific vertical solutions take full benefit from the openness and flexibility of the platform to facilitate interactions with original equipment manufacturers and suppliers while adhering to such industry standards as ARINC 661/664, FACE and AUTOSAR.
- 10x Improvements for Deeper Insight. ANSYS 17.0 delivers deeper insight into real-world product performance through such enhancements as higher fidelity simulations and better post processing. For example, with printed circuit boards, engineers can now quickly import ECAD geometry and perform coupled thermal-structural analysis with power integrity and electronics cooling analyses to accurately predict stress, deformation and fatigue. These capabilities enable engineers to design board layouts and thermal management strategies for more reliable electronic components. As a result, complex board and packages can be set up and solved in minutes, not hours or days.
- 10x Improvements to Performance. ANSYS 17.0 delivers performance improvements for all of its product lines, particularly in the realm of high-performance computing (HPC). ANSYS 17.0 introduces the most modern HPC solver architectures that leverages the latest processor technologies. Organizations can leverage this power on most IT configurations – from desktops to cloud environments – to obtain their simulation results sooner.
There is a clear global demand to develop more power efficient machines, but progress has been hindered due to the huge computational resources required to simulate an electric machine. Complete transient electromagnetic field analysis of an electric machine can require two weeks or more to complete. HPC advances in the ANSYS 17.0 electromagnetics suite deliver unprecedented computational speed for full transient electromagnetic field simulation for electric motor design. Simulations of critical transient behaviors that previously required weeks of computational time can now be completed in hours during early design stages, reducing the risk of project delays and late-stage design changes.
Organizations across a wide variety of industries are struggling to keep pace with the growing need for data-intensive modeling and large-scale simulations to accelerate business innovation,” said Scott Misage, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “By bringing together all high-performance computing (HPC) advances made in the new ANSYS 17 release with our industry-leading HPE Apollo compute platform for HPC and big data workloads, our customers can now transform their product development processes, reduce engineering costs and accelerate time-to-market.”
