Water Vapor Adsorption Simulation Comes to FloEFD

Mentor Graphics has made its first software release since Siemens announced its intent to purchase the company for $4.5 billion. The update comes to FloEFD, its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation In-CAD plug-in for various platforms, including Creo, CATIA V5, Siemens NX and SOLIDWORKS. The software is designed for engineers that need to bring CFD simulations early in the development cycle to better optimize their products and find issues early.

Simulation of humidity absorption in solids using FloEFD. (Image courtesy of Mentor Graphics.)

The major improvement to the fluid simulation tool is the ability to model sorption problems. For those that forget their mass transfer, sorption is when a substance permeates into another. Adsorption is when the process happens at the surface of a substrate. Absorption, on the other hand, is when one substance is integrated into another through the bulk or another—like when gas is absorbed into a liquid. Desorption on the other hand is when a substance that is adsorbed is released as a gas or liquid.

The plastics and automotive industries might want to take note of FloEFD’s sorption functionality. Plastics have a habit of absorbing and desorbing water while headlights have a knack for trapping moisture in their housings.

“The engineering team at SICK AG has been using FloEFD successfully for several years,” said Dirk Spreeman, project leader at SICK AG. “And now that the condensation functionality includes water vapor absorption in solids, we will be able to include simulation in the design process for our light sensors as well. To date, we have been unable to access this information until after the first prototype has been built. Therefore, we are very excited about gaining insight into the design earlier, when we can modify it quickly and inexpensively.”

A lot of the other improvements to FloEFD focus on the ability of the software to simulate more complex models. One example is the ability to work with components in FloEFD. Now engineers can reuse component task definitions from an assembly or call one up from a library of components. This will save users a lot of time creating designs with repeated subassemblies.

Other improvements to FloEFD include:

Directional sources of radiation patterns and spectrum definitions
A transient data explorer that saves time accessing data and combining animations of plots and charts
Design of Experiment and Response Surface Modeling to speed up product optimization
User interfaces in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Russian and English

To read the big news about Siemens, Mentor Graphics and their plans for CAE, check out “Siemens Makes Another Big CAE Purchase with Mentor Graphics.”