On-the-Fly Design and Analysis using Ansys Discovery

Hello, computer-aided engineers. Today, what I would like to talk about is a tool called Ansys Discovery. And I'm going to show that it is very easy to use, and then you can make quick design changes, essentially on the fly, and immediately start analyzing with these design changes.

It's not complicated. So, the first thing we do is build this model. You can totally build this simple model using the design tab, and under here, by using the operations, or a lot of times, we engineers use CAD, more advanced CAD tools, and then we can import anything.

For better design, you can go and do a high-fidelity simulation in structure. And you can essentially do that in a single window, without going explicitly to Ansys Mechanical or Fluent, etc. Or you can obviously do it up to the user.

Okay, so we have all these niceties within Discovery, and I'm going to show some more interesting niceties. So, let's kind of set up our problem, which I already did. It's a very simple problem. If you look at the physics, obviously, we want to specify air as our working fluid.

Gravity is not a factor because this is a forced convection. We can look at our boundary conditions, defining flow rate, and then we're going to calculate the splits, see how the flow distributes with this design, and see how we can improve this. So, we essentially have two modes, well, three modes.

First is the modeling mode, which we already used and built our model or imported. Next is the explore mode, where we simulate, kind of quick and dirty, with either of these physics, and then do a preliminary design.

Next is the refine mode, where now we can use a higher fidelity approach to validate our design. So, I'm going to specifically focus on the explore part, where we're going to make some design changes, and on the fly, we're going to run the model and see what the impact is.

So, I've already run this baseline model, but let's look at this notification first. You know, once the simulation is green, it means the simulation is complete, and as it runs, it's going to be kind of moving like a clock around here.

So, that's how you can identify a finished or converged solution. Let's check our notification. Okay, so we've used a constant temperature. It's just doing a warning. Sometimes, there are critical warnings or errors reported here. So, please pay attention to this button.

And looks like we already have a solution. So, let's kind of look at particles, which shows how the flow behaves. So, flow comes in, these kind of cute little bubbles are colored by velocity magnitude. There's a big recirculation zone.

We can kind of see underneath here, and above it, the flow accelerates and kind of goes over to the second leg, which has a wider open area, which obviously will get much more of the mass flow rate. And you can see that kind of flow accelerates due to the area shrink down.

We have a bit of the flow going kind of caught by the walls here. Looks like not enough flow is going to the smaller channel. So, you know, we may need to add some feature to get some air into this leg. Another way of looking at the solution is maybe more numerical, and we define some monitors.

You know, we have the pressure drop inlet to outlet, so we want to make sure we don't go over the allowed pressure drop, and we can see the mass flow one, which is this area, and the mass flow two.

So, what we see is about five grams per second of flow, about four grams are going, so you know that's what we're looking for. The next step is to apply some design changes. Let's move back to the design tab. What I would like to do is, as an engineer, I'm thinking maybe a guide vane.

If we place something like a C-shaped vane here, we can capture more of the flow. So, for this purpose, let me spin the model here. What I'm going to do is first, I'm going to create a plane, so I hit the plane button, or maybe I should first select this face, then hit this.

Now, you can see we have a plane object added, it's visible, and it's marked. So, I'm going to switch to the sketch mode. I'm going to add my spline, I'm going to hit escape, and then I'm going to do something roughly parallel, and hit escape.

Then, I'm going to complete the spline, so that now, using the pull option, I'm not going to pull it out, I'm going to drag it across the solid. Then, hit escape, go back to select mode, and now you can see we've essentially very quickly added a vane.

Next step, just go back to simulation and hit the solve button. And then, the solver just starts running again. And then, the solver just starts running again, and we can see the results. We achieved our goal, so it seems like adding a guide vane certainly improves the design.

We also note that the pressure drop went up a little, and that's to be expected, because essentially, we did add an obstruction to the flow field, and that's the penalty for it. But a quality design will help you keep the pressure drop low while achieving the mass split.

And this essentially concludes our demonstration regarding on-the-fly design capabilities of Ansys Discovery. Thank you for your attention.