[jsm]

Hi,

I am using ICEM CFD 11.0 now. I decided to switch over to newer version 12.0. But I could not find any major improvements in the latest release. Particularly geometry editing tools are not changed. I could not find any new geometry editing features in ICEM 12.0 Update pdf.

ANSA has many features for geometry editing. I expected similiar geometry handling features. Any comments???

With regards,

JSM

[PSYMN]

Hello JSM, yes, there were very few Geometry tool enhancements within the ICEM CFD software. For a list of enhancements, see the release notes that came with the installation or download the pdf from the customer portal.

We didn’t put much work into the ICEM CFD geometry tools because we shifted all our geometry experts (and all the geometry experts who made Gambit and CFX, etc.) over to our go forward geometry tool, ANSYS DesignModeler (Aka DM). By grouping all our developers into one group with a focus on a single product (and some bug fixing on the old products), we were able to get much further ahead with our most modern CAD tool.

http://www.ansys.com/products/workbench/dm/default.asp

DM has many advantages over ICEM CFD or Gambit geometry tools. It is parametric, has a proper sketch tool, can easily add or remove features (such as fillets), do Boolean operations, etc. It easily does many things that ICEM CFD users have been asking for for years, but we could never implement due to the surface modeling kernel that ICEM CFD is based on. DM is Parasolid kernel based and much more powerful.

ICEM CFD geometry tools will continue to be maintained for several years, and ICEM CFD is still the best place to work with faceted data, but DesignModeler will eventually replace the ICEM CFD Geometry tab (several years from now). At 12.0 we added an option, File => Workbench Readers, that lets you read these Design Modeler or other ANSYS Workbench files. It also lets you use the ANSYS Workbench CAD readers thru ICEM CFD.

While ANSYS DM does have a lot of repair tools (particularly at 12.0), it also has focused heavily on providing top notch bi-directional CAD readers that bring in the CAD very cleanly and therefore remove the need for a lot of the repair would that would be required with other preprocessing tools.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

[jsm]

Hi Simon,

Thanks for your detailed reply. I understand that ICEM CFD is surface kernel engine. I dont know that how difficult it is to make new features in software development point of view. However, "stand alone ICEM CFD" users will expect some new enhancements in the latest version.

Ok. I will try with DM for geometry clean up tools.