Altair AcuSolve 2025.1 Release Notes
Highlights
- Chemical Reaction for AcuSolve-EDEM coupling blast furnace applications.
- Immersed boundary surface (beta)
- Battery gas venting
- Thermal topology optimization
- AcuSolve-Flux two-way coupling
New Features
- EDEM coupling with chemical reaction for Blast furnace application
- The AcuSolve-EDEM coupling has been extended to support chemical reactions, primarily targeting blast furnaces in the steel manufacturing industry. This chemical reaction model includes both homogeneous and heterogeneous reactions in the bidirectional coupling, which are modeled alongside momentum and energy exchanges. This model can be utilized for coal gasification and combustion in fluidized reactions, as well as iron ore reduction in blast furnaces, predicting ore reduction using either carbon (coke particles) and/or hydrogen processes.
- Immersed boundary surface (beta): Enhancing mesh flexibility
- While AcuSolve does not rely on mesh quality, creating water-tight meshes can be time-consuming for you. Additionally, certain corner cases, such as overlapping blade applications in mower scenarios, cannot be handled by water-tight meshes. To address these challenges, the AcuSolve team has developed the immersed boundary surface and introduced this feature as a beta, as further fine-tuning is necessary. The immersed boundary surface provides greater flexibility in mesh generation, allowing you to swap parts for design optimization and significantly reduce pre-processing time, as it does not require clean CAD models. This beta feature currently supports flow, turbulence with the SA turbulence model, complex mesh motion, and EDEM coupling. However, heat transfer and radiation are not supported in this version. In SimLab, the immersed wall icon is available when flow with particle solution is selected.
- Battery gas venting modeling
- Lithium-ion batteries are equipped with vents or burst discs designed to
release gases during thermal runaway. These vents serve as a critical
safety function by preventing excessive pressure buildup, which could
otherwise lead to cell rupture or explosion. AcuSolve’s thermal runaway
battery solution has been enhanced with two models to simulate gas
venting in lithium-ion batteries:
- Experimental Gas Venting Data Model- This model relies on experimentally measured venting parameters, such as the mass flow rate of vented gases and vent gas temperature. Venting is triggered based on cell temperature.
- Pressure-Reaction Model – This model simulates gas venting by directly calculating gas accumulation, pressure buildup, and subsequent venting. The venting is triggered when internal pressure exceeds a critical threshold. This method requires gas composition analysis, such as Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis performed post-ARC testing.
- Thermal topology optimization
- Topology optimization has been extended to include thermal optimization, enhancing the design of heat sinks, cooling jackets, and cooling plates. This feature optimizes temperature changes from inlets to outlets, ensuring the best thermal performance while controlling fluid losses. A major benefit is the elimination of hot spots, leading to even temperature distribution across devices. You can define objectives to maximize temperature from inlets to outlets while constraining mechanical fluid losses. The process uses filtering equations to set minimum design sizes, avoiding overly small features in the computed geometry. Among the turbulence models available from AcuSolve, the SA turbulence model now supports topology optimization for high Reynolds number flows. The topology is computed as a design field, which can be visualized at any iteration during the simulation. At the final iteration, a level-set surface is computed based on a user-defined length scale, providing smoother geometry for downstream applications. You can remesh this computed geometry with a body-fitted mesh to validate device performance. SimLab does not support this feature in time for the release. While waiting for the SimLab implementation, a Python script can be used to convert an input file with basic flow settings to a topology optimization input file.
- AcuSolve-Flux Two-Way Coupling
- Engineers developing electric machines can now accurately predict thermal behavior under electromagnetic influences, enabling enhanced cooling strategies and performance evaluation. This is achieved through the two-way bi-directional coupling of AcuSolve and Flux via the Kratos framework. This coupling is particularly valuable for improving performance of electrical machines, such as electric motors and induction heating devices. The Kratos framework facilitates seamless data sharing between AcuSolve and Flux, accommodating different mesh types with a reliable mesh mapper. It supports 3D AcuSolve with 2D Flux coupling. The AcuSolve-Flux two-way coupling and the Kratos library are integrated within SimLab, which operates on the Windows platform.
Enhancements
- Wet Particle Initialization
- A new parameter, edem_initial_liquid_mass_ratio, is introduced to set the initial fraction of liquid mass applied to particles for wet particle modeling in AcuSolve-EDEM bi-directional simulations. This enhancement streamlines the workflow of wet particle modeling in industries that handle wet granular materials, such as asphalt production manufacturing using a rotating drum dryer or pharmaceutical industry using a pill dryer.
- Non-Zero Starting Time Support for EDEM
- A new parameter, edem_initial_time under AUTO_SOLUTION_STRATEGY, enables setting a non-zero initial time for starting or restarting the EDEM solver in coupled simulations. You can now restart simulations from an arbitrary point in time, reducing redundant computations and allowing more flexible case setups.
- AcuTrans File name Using User-Defined Names
- AcuTrans now supports user-defined names for file names instead of numerical IDs in post-processing.
- PowerShell Script for AcuSolve Windows Environment
- AcuSolve’s Windows distribution now includes a PowerShell script
(acusim.ps1) for directly sourcing the AcuSolve
environment in a PowerShell terminal. This allows you to:
- Execute AcuSolve commands directly in PowerShell.
- Run custom PowerShell scripts with AcuSolve environment settings pre-loaded.
Resolved Issues
- Fixed an issue where the porosity_model with cylindrical porosity and radial flow direction did not function correctly.
- The diffusivity equation (2) under DIFFUSIVITY_MODEL was updated to reflect the density-weighted diffusivity definition.
- The acuFWH and acuRunFwh sections were removed from the Program Reference Manual, as AcuSolve is no longer positioning for the acoustic applications.