Anyone used Ansys/Flotran - cf. with other codes?

S. Langsford

I'm currently looking at several options for purchasing a general purpose CFD code. I know that all commercial CFD codes are limited in their accuracy and require a high degree of knowledge to be applied correctly.

In particular, it would seem that turbulence modelling using variations of the standard k-epsilon model are the basics for any of the commercial codes, and this will always be inherently limited.

One of the codes under consideration is the Flotran module available as a package with the Ansys mechanical/structural solver. It has the obvious advantage of also including a respected and widely used FEA mechanical solver together with the CFD software. However, I believe that the Flotran component is rather more primitive/limited than the standalone codes, eg. Fluent.

I am wondering if anyone has - experience with using Flotran, and comments on its performance, especially if any experimental validation has been performed; - general comments/opinions/information on the accuracy and adequacy of Flotran (compared with specific CFD solvers such as Fluent) for various flow problems.

My main applications are likely to be electronics packaging, heat transfer, natural convection in sealed and vented enclosures, and occasional external flow problems such as flow over aircraft stores.

I have already looked at the "CFD Benchmarks" ASME paper, which was useful but, as stated within it, the findings are only as good as the understanding of the problem by those who provided the model solutions ... and the CFD codes have already grown considerably since that paper was written.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Also, any responses which could be emailed directly to me would be most helpful.

Regards,

Simon Langsford Vision Abell p/l