Altair ultraFluidX 2025.1 Release Notes
New Features
- Thermal solver
- ultraFluidX 2025.1 introduces thermal solution capabilities, featuring two thermal models: scalar transport and Boussinesq, which can be used alongside overset mesh. This release also includes three heat exchanger models—constant fluid temperature, constant coolant temperature, and constant heat release—along with a thermal wall model for facilitating heat exchange between surfaces and airflow. The thermal model enables the simulation of powertrain cooling scenarios involving multiple heat exchangers, utilizing fan-driven airflow over hot components.
Enhancements
- Coarsening of outputs
- The previous release, ultraFluidX 2025, introduced a feature that allows you to write output at a mesh resolution that is one refinement level coarser than the mesh used during the simulation, that is, combining 8 voxels into one. This feature is now extended such that data from two consecutive refinement levels can be included in the output coarsening. Writing volume data on a mesh coarsened by two refinement levels, that is, combining 4x4x4 voxels into one, can help to significantly reduce the output data size.
- Enhanced probe specification
- ultraFluidX allows you to specify probe points via coordinates for tracking data on individual points on surfaces inside the simulation domain. In order to avoid probing on unintended parts, this feature is enhanced in ultraFluidX 2025.1 to allow you to specify target parts that the probe location should ‘snap’ to. This is especially useful in complex geometries with small distances between parts, where it is difficult to identify a precise location for a surface probe.
- Overset mesh memory distribution
- Cases using overset meshes can suffer from a memory imbalance. This can be avoided by using a new feature for the area where moving and static mesh overlap, which distributes the data required in this area equally across all GPUs used in the simulation, alleviating the memory requirement which is otherwise placed on one single GPU. Note that results based on this feature may not be bitwise identical to previous results.
Resolved Issues
- Part names containing the special characters \ / : * ? “ < > | can create issues when used in a file name, in particular on a Windows system. In ultraFluidX, part names are used in output file names when coefficients or forces and moments are requested to be written individually for all parts in a simulation. This issue is resolved in ultraFluidX 2025.1 by replacing the characters mentioned above by an underscore _ when creating the respective output files for the concerned parts of the geometry.