Product design engineers need to evaluate how their designs are affected by environmental factors, and simulations are a time- and resource-efficient way to perform these evaluations. Exa’s PowerFLOW Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulator is one popular simulation tool, and the recent release of PowerFLOW 5.4 expands its capabilities and better models real-world factors such as dust, dirt, and water. This release improves four primary feature sets:
- Modeling real-world driving conditions – New innovations better simulate the impact of tire tread patterns and the effects of wind and turbulence., providing more accurate evaluations of vehicle performance, fuel efficiency, and regulations.
- Soil and water management – Dirt, dust and water are now simulated with a transient solver for improved accuracy. Engineers can better evaluate and improve soil and water accumulation with the improved particle handling capability.
- Simulation reliability and repeatability – Expert knowledge built into the simulator determines the optimal time to stop the simulation to ensure consistent and robust simulation results, resulting in more accurate and repeatable simulations that also won’t slow your computer to a crawl.
- Interactive 3D visualizations – Improved interactive 3D algorithms provide faster rendering of 3D surface data, allowing users to visualize 3D models in real-time.
The big improvement in this release is the ability to better evaluate environmental performance. For example, the designer can simulate the aerodynamic impact of wind load and turbulence due to accumulated dirt, or find out what happens to efficiency when you drive the vehicle through a thunderstorm. PowerFLOW 5.4 maintains and improves other features from prior versions, including aerodynamic simulation and evaluation, vehicle handling, wind noise evaluation, cooling airflow, drive cycle simulation, cabin climate control, drivetrain cooling, and engine cooling.
PowerFLOW 5.4 significantly improves system simulation capability for vehicles. For more details and information about PowerFLOW 5.4, visit the Exa website.