Future of CFX Grid Generation
 

Hello all,

I have heard rumours, that in the future ICEM will be the standard grid generation tool of CFX5 (as CFX-BUILD is based on Patran from MSC, a competitor of ANSYS).

Is this correct?

Will the grid generation be based on the standard ICEM suite or on the AI*environment from ANSYS?

Greetings,

Henry

Re: Future of CFX Grid Generation
 

Hi Henry,

It's more than just a rumour, it is now official. Below is a copy of the customer letter which CFX/ANSYS put on the CFX community web page (placed here for the benefit of those without access to it).

Glenn

************

September 8, 2003

Dear Customer,

The purpose of this letter is to inform you of some important changes to our product direction, in the area of geometry and mesh creation. This comes as a result of the recent acquisition of CFX by ANSYS Inc. and our desire to immediately offer you the benefits of technology synergy across ANSYS, ICEM CFD, and of course CFX.

We will be withdrawing CFX-Build from sale effective September 15, 2003, and fully retiring the product as of March 31, 2004. We are immediately replacing CFX-Build however, with a new product family, created jointly out of the following technologies – ANSYS DesignModeler, (the solid-modeling and geometry creation tool in Workbench), a special version of ICEM CFD Tetra Prism, and the unique meshing capabilities of CFX-Build. The development plan for this important product will ultimately provide our customers with the next generation in geometry and mesh creation techniques, seamlessly integrated into the rest of the CFX product suite, and into the ANSYS Workbench design and analysis environment. It is in fact an important part of a broader, more far-reaching product strategy now in place across all of ANSYS. We will share key elements of this with you soon.

As a loyal and committed customer of CFX, and an established user of CFX-Build, I want to assure you that we intend to make this transition as seamless as possible, both technically and commercially. You will be contacted soon by your local CFX representatives, who will be able to fully describe our plans over the next 6 to 9 months, and more importantly, how your specific situation will be addressed. I encourage you to ensure that the CFX team is fully aware of the specifics of your use of CFX-Build, and of any concerns you may have at your location.

Our goal within the next 12 months is to take a quantum step in the area of CAD import, geometry creation and mesh generation. We intend to provide you with state of the art capabilities, for both fluid and structural applications, and with a high degree of interoperability and data exchange enabling true fluid-structure problem solving. Longer term, ANSYS Workbench will provide a powerful design and analysis environment wherein entirely different classes of problems will be able to be defined and solved.

The CFX team is anxious to meet with you to discuss this in more detail, and to begin planning the steps necessary for your engineering team. Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions in this regard.

Yours very truly,

J. Christopher Reid

Vice President and General Manager

Fluids Business

Re: Future of CFX Grid Generation
 

Sounds to me like it isn't just a case of throwing ICEM in front of CFX-5. If you read carefully:

We are immediately replacing CFX-Build however, with a new product family, created jointly out of the following technologies – ANSYS DesignModeler, (the solid-modeling and geometry creation tool in Workbench), a special version of ICEM CFD Tetra Prism, and the unique meshing capabilities of CFX-Build. The development plan for this important product will ultimately provide our customers with the next generation in geometry and mesh creation techniques, seamlessly integrated into the rest of the CFX product suite, and into the ANSYS Workbench design and analysis environment. It is in fact an important part of a broader, more far-reaching product strategy now in place across all of ANSYS. We will share key elements of this with you soon.

He says they are replacing it with a NEW product family created from ANSYS DesignModeller, a special version of ICEM CFD Tetra/Prism, and the unique meshing capabilities of CFX-Build. I'm not sure what "special" means wrt Tetra/Prism, but the last item is the most intriguing. I have heard that the meshing technology in Build is not Patran based and belongs to CFX, so this would seem to imply they are adding it to Workbench, or integrating it with ICEM.

It sounds to me like they are combining all this technology into a single meshing package. Meshing aside, the letter goes on to talk about Fluid-Structure interaction. Sounds like ANSYS/CFX has not wasted any time to get things going on this. Unbeleivable given that they only bought CFX 6 months ago! ICEM has been with ANSYS for over 3 years now and haven't done this much!

I personally think this all sounds pretty cool. I'm not sure how CFX users feel, but it sure makes me want another look at CFX, not to mention ANSYS.

J.F.

Re: Future of CFX Grid Generation
 

Joseph,

You are correct. The unstructured tet/prism mesher in CFX-Build is owned by CFX and is only "driven" using Patran for the GUI. Both of ICEM tetra/prism and CFX unstructured tetra/prism mesher will be integrated into ANSYS Workbench in the near future and you will have the choice to use either. In time the market will determine which meshing technology is the most useful (ICEM or CFX native meshing, or some combination of the best ideas in both).

Work is proceeding on coupling between the CFX-5 flow solver and the ANSYS multi-field solver. One way coupling of loads and heat transfer is already available betweeen CFX-5.6 and ANSYS 7.0. More extensive one way coupling and also two way coupling is actively being worked on at this time. In the next year or so you should start seeing progress in this area.

Neale.