ANSYS AIM 17.2: Expanding Upfront Simulation for the Design Engineer

The latest innovations for thermal management and bolted assemblies

With today’s latest release of ANSYS AIM, organizations can accelerate product design through upfront simulation, mitigate late-stage design changes, and reduce the number of costly physical prototypes. Now available, ANSYS AIM 17.2 enhances engineering simulation for thermal management, extends collaboration between designers and analysts, and brings upfront simulation to Japanese engineers in their own language.

“We are pleased that our customers continue to benefit from the rapid development of ANSYS AIM, allowing new applications to be solved with every release,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, chief product officer, ANSYS. “The new functionality in AIM will better enable engineers to push the boundaries of product design with its enhanced upfront simulation capabilities to speed up productivity and accurately predict product performance with ease.”  

AIM enables design exploration for every engineer by providing intuitive, guided workflows, accurate simulation results, and customization in a complete simulation tool covering a broad range of physics.  AIM’s ease-of-use simulation environment minimizes training and allows engineers to quickly become productive with simulation.

“ANSYS AIM's ease-of-use has allowed us to introduce key simulation skills and concepts to students using real industrial tools early in the engineering curriculum,” said Sanjeev Bedi, professor of engineering at the University of Waterloo.

Upfront simulation improves productivity of design engineers, by enabling them to make informed decisions early in the product’s life cycle, minimizing the need for re-work and re-design later in the process.

Highlights available in ANSYS AIM 17.2 include:

Thermal Management Advances
Optimizing heat transfer and thermal stress is a critical design issue for many industry applications, including heat exchangers, thermal mixing valves, engine components and electronic devices. Accurate predictions of the temperature and heat transfer in both the fluid and solid regions is essential to accurately predict the thermal and thermal-stress performance of the design. The new version of AIM builds upon its existing, combined fluid thermal and solid thermal-stress capabilities, supporting upfront simulation to optimize the thermal and fluid performance of product designs.
Momentum and heat sources are now available for fluid and conjugate heat transfer analysis, enabling simulations to include such features as electronic package power sources, fans and filters. Heat loads from a magneto-static solution can also be applied. Additionally, the new thermal transient simulation of solids allows time-dependent effects to be considered for solid thermal models with convection and radiation boundary conditions. Thermal effects can now also be included in polymer extrusion simulations. Combined, these new features and more improve the speed and fidelity of upfront simulation for thermal management.

Better Bolted Connections
Bolted connections between components are common elements in construction and machines. Accurately simulating bolt tightening sequences and the resulting contact pressures as well as frictional stresses between the parts is required to accurately predict the structural performance of bolted connections. ANSYS AIM 17.2 provides new options for optimizing bolted connections that allow engineers to correctly model loading and bolt tightening sequences for structural assemblies.

Enhanced Collaboration
Many of today’s industry leaders are working to improve their product creation processes by having design engineers perform upfront simulation. As part of these initiatives, design engineers may need to pass their simulation models to analysts to perform more advanced simulations or to validate their results. By leveraging the power of the ANSYS Workbench platform, AIM now enables collaboration among design engineers and simulation analysts through the drag-and-drop transfer of AIM simulation models to the flagship ANSYS Mechanical environment.

Support for Native Languages
Most product design engineers are more comfortable and productive when working with software in their native language. ANSYS AIM 17.2 introduces a Japanese language user interface, making upfront simulation more accessible than ever to Japanese-speaking engineers.