Check it Out: the STAR-CCM+ and Abaqus FEA Co-simulation PDF

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

A few weeks back CD-adapco announced that its STAR-CCM+ simulation tool now includes a direct link to Abaqus FEA from SIMULIA. This bringing together of two top-shelf applications enables you to run fully coupled, two-way, fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analyses.

“And, um, so what? FSI has been around awhile,” I hear some of you scoff.

You're right. FSI has been around awhile. However, if you could afford to do FSI -- “if” and “afford” being the operative words -- it has mostly been somewhat elementary in nature. To really understand the complex interaction of structures and fluids, you had to run separate analyses and configure some sort of middleware communications link between the two analysis applications every time you ran a simulation. And, in addition to this time sink, the computing horsepower required to do the numeric crunching inherent to FSI are huge. This is why highly complex FSI has been a game playable only to those in pure, well-funded research, government, and academic settings.

The STAR-CCM+ and Abaqus FEA connection changes the playing field. First, both are widely deployed industrial strength applications that have been software-engineered to be easy to use by engineers slogging away in the mainstream engineering design and analysis cycle. The STAR-CCM+ environment, for example, doesn't make you write scripts and input files or mapping data. With the new coupling, you tell STAR-CCM+ what Abaqus job you want to run and off the two of them go.

Second, both applications, on their own, operate efficiently. The latter means that, together, they make the compute-resource demands of complex FSI manageable as well as efficient. Third, the STAR-CCM+ and Abaqus FEA connection is a direct co-simulation coupling – there is no middle translation layer to bog down performance with file transfers and delay time to solution. Both applications do their physics thing and exchange data with one another simultaneously.

By delivering fully coupled, two-way, co-simulation the STAR-CCM+ and Abaqus FEA connection could make complex fluid-structure-thermal calculations a regular part of your engineering design and analysis process. You can check this out some more by downloading the small PDF file from the link over there. This is good stuff.

Thanks, Pal. -- Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Check out the STAR-CCM+ and Abaqus FEA Co-simulation PDF.