Earlier this year, the engineers at SoftInWay announced a tool that integrates the company’s various turbomachinery simulation products. The result, AxSTREAM System Simulation combines two big hitters—SoftInWay’s legacy AxCYCLE for thermodynamic design and AxSTREAM NET for fluid system modeling. But the integrated tool also adds features from several other products with a little polish and shine. Nonetheless, the focus is still on simulating turbomachinery and energy conversion.
“After speaking with a number of clients about what would improve their engineering toolchain, the feedback was clear,” said SoftInWay’s CEO Leonid Moroz. “The industry needs a reliable and integrated way to design, view and analyze entire systems. In reality, these complex systems and their components do not operate independently. What we often see is different departments working on different functions of the same system, which leads to informational, technological and compatibility bottlenecks. In addition, we are also seeing an unprecedented rise in innovative technology such as fuel cells, supersonics and hydrogen propulsion. As this technology evolves, so must the engineering tools used to develop it.”
The Burlington, Mass. simulation company has offices around the world and more than 500 customers in industry and academia. Founded in 1999, SoftInWay focuses on turbomachinery and transferring energy between rotors and fluids. Although relatively small in the simulation arena, AxSTREAM has a large customer base and a solid lineup of success stories. This System Simulation integration feels a little like the repackaging trends we’ve seen in large simulation companies over the last few years.
Remaining True to Simulation While Focusing on Turbomachinery
AxCYCLE feels like an old-school systems-level thermodynamic tool built for analyzing cycles—just as the name suggests. Users can start with a blank page and build a new cycle, or they can create a model by tweaking an existing system. Once engineers build a system, they can work to optimize it by changing parameters or switching in different components. Libraries of components and fluids are already available for users to pull from to add to a simulation. Alternatively, new components can be made by modifying parameters. As for the fluids, standards like water, steam, carbon dioxide, air and natural gas are available. However, libraries for less common fluids are there too, such as combustibles, thermal oils, molten salts and NIST mixtures. The libraries are great because any time that a simulation engineer saves by using preexisting items is time that can be spent optimizing the entire system.
AxSTREAM NET is the other SoftInWay staple. It focuses on one-dimensional hydraulic networks. Before full 3D models of the components and systems are completed, engineers can simulate different configurations to optimize thermal and fluid flows. Heat exchangers, anti-icing systems, lubrication systems and motor cooling are viable use cases. The solver uses the finite volume method to study compressible and incompressible fluids in both steady-state and transient situations. The one-dimensional nature of the simulations means that results are fast—an engineer can run several different iterations of a proposed design and compare the results. Secondary flow systems, where rotating surface elements and ducts with different cross sections can be analyzed, are also in the mix. Users can analyze large or small systems by adding and subtracting components and calculating a wide array of parameters including:
- Velocity
- Pressure
- Density
- Temperature
- Mass flow rate
- Pressure loss
The tool can also assess heat transfer coefficients for systems with convection and/or conduction. Programming continues to be a skill that every engineer should have, and AxSTREAM NET has C# scripting that allows users to build subroutines for calculations.
Several AxSTREAM modules are available for customers working on specific applications. These include AxMAP for performance mapping, AxCFD for 2D and 3D analysis in blade-to-blade channels, AxSLICE to reverse engineer blade geometry and RotorDynamics to analyze a rotor’s natural frequencies. AxSTREAM.SPACE, which is built for spacecraft applications, is focused on liquid propulsion and is called out as a software bundle instead of a module inside of AxSTREAM. The software tools here seem like they could be used for a wide variety of applications, but all of the applications are tightly focused on turbines and compressors.
AxSTREAM System Simulation combines these tools and adds some data sharing and communication capabilities. Sharing data between systems like this solves the problem of interface management. Two different departments working on mating components can send parametric models and data back and forth, but having both of those teams working from the same set of data removes many possible sources of error. The main goal of the tools here is still simulation—giving engineers better results earlier in the design and development process so that better decisions can be made.
Customer Success Stories and a Commitment to Education
One of the difficult things about teaching thermodynamics to engineering students is the wide breadth of topics contained in the course. In an ideal world we would consider specific volume, steam tables, enthalpy and entropy before doing a little hand-waving and razzle-dazzle to introduce power cycles, where everything comes together. In practice, keeping learner enthusiasm at manageable levels is difficult while adding several new concepts every week. Anything you can do to make the learning more interactive helps and I’ve used tools like AxCYCLE—but with a much smaller in scope—several times over my teaching career.
SoftInWay has a huge commitment to teaching users about its software as well as about thermodynamics. SoftInWay Turbomachinery University has a wide array of classes that mostly focus on basic component design and then incorporate using the software to perform design and analysis techniques. This is an incredibly smart tactic where new users can become familiar with the fundamentals of the software and also shore up internal knowledge about pumps, compressors, fans or turbochargers. In addition to training users on its software, the company sponsored the Launch Canada Challenge for students who want to pursue rocketry.
Beyond this commitment to education, the SoftInWay website also highlights several customer success stories, which demonstrate direct applications for the software. My favorites are the UAV Turbines and Reaction Engines projects. UAV’s engineering team used AxSTREAM NET software to help develop a 100,000 rpm microturbine engine, which resulted in an aircraft that “flew much quieter and smoother with the Monarch 5 when compared with other internal combustion engine systems on the market.” Meanwhile, Reaction Engines used AxSTREAM in the development of its SABRE engine compressors and customized the software to create a loss model for the engine’s compressor.
What Does It All Mean?
SoftInWay chooses to focus on a specific functional area for its simulation—turbomachinery. There is an incredibly crowded field of companies working in this lane, many of which are small and focused on energy conversion, but the household names of simulation are there too. Compressible flow dynamics is even broad enough that CAD companies like SOLIDWORKS Simulation and Fusion 360 are in the mix. The idea that SoftInWay can partner with Siemens—as the company did in 2020 to expand its clients’ software portfolios to tools like Siemens Simcenter and STAR-CCM+—and build a big chunk of customer case studies feels to me like positive indicators of company performance.
Pulling several tools together for an integrated systems simulation approach isn’t a new idea, but we’re about to reach the point where it’s almost a requirement for simulation companies to stay competitive. One of the simulation trends in the last few years has been centralized data storage to understand interactions and better communicate results between groups. This is where giants like Ansys and Altair have an advantage because of their large infrastructure that already allows disparate tools to share data. SoftInWay is definitely moving in the right direction, but the move might be lagging behind by a few years.