The silver bullet for engineering simulation?


In the first of a new series of company profiles,


Gemma Church investigates how CD-adapco


is helping engineers to collaborate and move complex simulations into the design phase


world, testing during the design process is a vital yet difficult task. In the past, with limited computer resources, and simulation tools that lacked complex physics models, engineers were sometimes forced to make bigger simplifications than they were comfortable with. Te simulation process was also expensive, in terms of hardware and licensing costs, and oſten deployed so late in the design process that only a handful of worst-case simulations were possible. One proposed resolution to these


W


simulation issues is a process called MDX (Multidisciplinary Design eXploration), and it is a process that engineering simulation company CD-adapco is pioneering.


What is MDX? As product designs become increasingly complex, engineers are now required to simulate entire systems to produce the quality products their customers require. David L Vaughn, global vice president


of marketing at CD-adapco, told Scientific Computing World: ‘An uncomfortable truth about modern engineering is that there really are no easy problems leſt to solve. In order to meet the demands of industry, it is no longer good enough to do “a bit of CFD” or “some stress analysis”. Complex industrial problems require solutions that span a multitude of physical phenomena, which


24 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD


ant to make an engineer nervous? Just utter the words ‘untested design’ and step back. Within the engineering


The effect of rotor wake in an UAV hunter using overset mesh: isosurface of Q-criterion coloured by vorticity showing rotor wake


oſten can only be solved using simulation techniques that cross several engineering disciplines.’ By adopting an MDX philosophy,


engineers are able to test designs automatically from the early concept stages and against all of the physical factors that might influence a system’s performance. It assesses which set of design parameters will break a system, and which will improve it. Tis pushes back the simulation process to force engineers to question every assumption they have made within a design, and optimise it appropriately by assessing a simulation with multiple operating scenarios. In essence, MDX allows users to


understand a product’s performance throughout the design space, and CD-adapco expects this will accelerate the decision- making processes as a product is designed.


Vaughn added: ‘Engineering simulation


soſtware has gone from being strictly a troubleshooting R&D tool to a standard part of the product design process. Deployed earlier and earlier in the process, it is increasingly being used in a design exploration mode to investigate hundreds of possible design variants and predicting how they will perform under real-world operating conditions.’


The MDX landscape MDX oſten involves the coupling of various simulation soſtware tools; each one is specialised in addressing a specific part of the problem, which allows an engineer to model an entire system instead of its individual components. Tis can be quite a difficult task in


terms of the computation power and the complexity required to run such simulations,


@scwmagazine l www.scientific-computing.com


CDadapco


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