Simcenter STAR-CCM+ v13.06: What's New?

By Stephen Ferguson

The latest release of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ increases model realism through efficient and accurate multiscale simulations.

Simulation courtesy of InDesA GmbH: www.indesa.de

“Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity, and little whirls have lesser whirls, and so on to viscosity”, wrote physicist and meteorologist (and father of CFD) Lewis Fry Richardson while describing turbulence. This short poem rather elegantly describes a fundamental feature of all practical engineering problems: interactions between physical phenomena that span a multitude of time and length-scales, usually involving several orders of magnitude.

As engineers, we need to decide which scales we will model directly, which can be represented using statistical averages (because they are too small or fast) and which can be neglected (because they are too big or slow to influence the problem we are trying to solve). However, when creating a functioning digital twin of a product, there are often situations in which we must fully resolve phenomena across multiple scales.

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ v13.06 contains a range of new features that allow you to more accurately and quickly solve problems that involve vastly different length and time scales. The new release also delivers many additional features to help engineers make critical design decisions quickly and with confidence.

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ v13.06 benefits and features at a glance:

increased efficiency and usability for multiscale applications

improved accuracy for thermal stress and combustion applications

productivity gains and greater insight for complex chemistry simulations

greater insight with enhancements for design exploration and VR

better connectivity with PLMXML import into 3D-CAD

Increased efficiency and usability for multiscale applications

The latest release focuses on enhancements to reduce the computational cost and increase the efficiency of multiscale simulations.

In LES or DES simulations, accurately resolving turbulence the full distance between an inlet boundary and a region of interest can lead to infeasible mesh sizes. Using the new anisotropic linear forcing function in v13.06, synthetic turbulence can now be generated inside a volume of interest rather than at an inflow boundary. This allows for coarser meshes, significantly reducing computational cost and turnaround time.

For Conjugate Heat Transfer problems, the thermal response time of solids is usually much longer than the fast-transient timescale of fluid dynamic fluctuations. The new explicit fluid-to-solid mapping in v13.06 links these different timescales by passing the right physical quantities, taking radiation and other thermal effects into account and averaging them when they are unsteady. This enhances the usability of CHT simulations and minimizes the user error.

Related to this, v13.06 also allows for solver-specific stopping criteria when using simulations that run multiple solvers consecutively. Previous stopping criteria were shared by solvers, forcing users to write lengthy macros to change the values when switching solvers. Simcenter STAR-CCM+ v13.06 moves the ownership of stopping criteria to the solvers and applies them incrementally with each execution of the solver, enabling automation of consecutive multiple solver iterations thus improving the overall efficiency of multi-timescale simulations

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Improved accuracy for thermal stress and combustion

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ v13.06 also provides enhancements in terms of modeling capabilities to enable engineers to accurately predict and understand product performance in real-life scenarios.

With the implementation of the Thickened Flame Model for complex chemistry and flamelets, Simcenter STAR-CCM+ v13.06 enables more accurate calculations of flame front and position during LES combustion simulations. This model artificially thickens the flame to resolve the flame front on a given grid without refining the mesh to fully resolve the physical front, resulting in more efficient and highly accurate flame position predictions.

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ v13.06 also improves the process for accurate thermal stress analysis with the introduction of a finite element energy solver, allowing both energy and stress to be computed on the same mesh and eliminating mapping-related interpolation errors. This improves both the efficiency and accuracy of thermal stress simulations and will benefit users modeling gas turbine blades and automotive components such as engine blocks and turbochargers.

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Productivity gains and greater insight for complex chemistry simulations

This release also further streamlines workflows and delivers faster simulations to help engineers efficiently assess the performance of more product design variants than previously possible.

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ v13.06 brings major enhancements to its complex chemistry solver to enable running high fidelity combustion and emission simulations at a much lower CPU cost. This lets you easily transition from flamelet to complex chemistry combustion simulations with less need for acceleration techniques, making accurate combustion and emission predictions much more accessible.

Solution histories grant you the ability to work with the smaller data-sets to make rapid, well-considered decisions. With v13.06, solution history representations can now be used with surface instead of volume data mappers to make faster and more concise quantitative comparisons between a design running at different operating conditions, results at different timesteps, or different designs.

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Greater insight with enhancements for design exploration and VR

With every release of Simcenter STAR-CCM+, we invest heavily in the areas of design exploration and visualization to ensure users get the necessary insight to make better design decisions, faster.

In a design process, there are typically multiple conflicting objectives at play, opening the door to an infinite number of possible design improvements, depending on which objective is favored. Design Manager in v13.06 provides Pareto plots that allow for quick visualization of such trade-offs during design exploration studies to help you to better understand the relative cost-benefit ratio between competing objectives and speed up design decisions.

For in-cylinder simulation, a significant enhancement to STAR-ICE allows users to take an existing model and make a CAD update with just a few clicks, retaining all set-up information and automatically updating all steps in the simulation process. This saves engineering time by eliminating replication of set-ups and additionally facilitates advanced design exploration using Design Manager.

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ v13.06 also delivers visualization enhancements that enable you to make better-informed decisions. The Simcenter STAR-CCM+ VR immersive environment now allows users to rapidly and interactively create iso-surfaces, making it even easier to gain a deeper understanding of the simulation results. Iso-surfaces can be made persistent, adding important layers of informational detail to an existing visualization.

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Better connectivity with PLMXML import into 3D-CAD

The latest release also aims to create a more consistent user experience across the Simcenter portfolio as well as provide a better integration into the wider PLM process.

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ v13.06 brings improved support for PLMXML import, allowing direct import of assembly structures created in Teamcenter into the built-in 3D-CAD modeler in Simcenter STAR-CCM+. The ability to build simulations directly from a Teamcenter assembly will particularly benefit users building simulations from many individual imported components.