Friendship Systems has just released the newest incarnation of its flagship software package CAESES (or CAE System Empowering Simulation, to satisfy the needs of the acronym buster).
The design optimization tool, primarily aimed at computational fluid dynamics (CFD) engineers, offers an upfront CAD capability allied with the ability to link directly into your CFD engine of choice to run design optimization studies.
Whilst most major CFD packages now come with associated design optimization tools (HEEDS with STAR-CCM+ and ANSYS DesignXplorer, for example), these are often offered as a separate add-on—so CAESES can offer some competition in this area.
Whilst the in-house design optimization tools associated with the major CFD packages may integrate better with their host package and may have some additional features (we won’t get into a full product comparison), what CAESES offers is a completely independent design optimization tool which can move between different CFD packages and appears to offer a fairly straightforward tool to get the job done.
This may appeal in particular to engineers working across multiple modeling packages, or to small- to medium-scale companies looking to move into design exploration without having to commit to the expense of a high-end commercial CFD system.
The main highlights of this particular release are improvements in the visualization of results, including tools such as the “Pareto frontier,” which plots out all of the cases which have been run against key results parameters and highlights the cases which offer the best compromise between competing targets.
The release also features a design identification system, where the best designs will be highlighted with a star when viewed in list form. The best designs will also be highlighted when the data is visualized in plot form, adding further insight into the design space.
As the fundamental purpose of this package is to help optimize designs and to help the user identify the design factors which most strongly affect results, this kind of visualization is a significant addition in helping to simplify the process of sifting through the various cases considered to find your winner.
As for other key new features in version 4.1.2, users are also now able to export their optimized design, complete with associated simulation data, directly from the design tree into a new CAESES project. This should help users to continue working on a particular case without the distraction of many other unsuccessful candidates clogging up the workspace.
This version of CAESES also improves on its Adjoint CFD capability, which enables it to consider results from various CFD packages and map them to variables within the parametric model. In this update, Adjoint CFD data can now be used as a direct input to the sensitivity computation, making the whole CFD-led optimization process more straightforward.
For more information, visit the CAESES website.