Elastic membranes and walls
Version 9.3 enables users to model fluid-structure interaction with elastic membranes and elastically-flexing walls. The model simulates the manner in which the small deformations of these types of membranes and walls impact the motion of the adjacent fluid, as well as showing how pressures in the fluid affects the deformations. These fluid-structure interactions are fully coupled.
FLOW-3D is a powerful modeling tool that gives engineers valuable insight into many physical flow processes.  With special capabilities for accurately predicting free-surface flows, FLOW-3D is the ideal software to use in your design phase as well as in improving production processes.

FLOW-3D is an all-inclusive package. No special additional modules for meshing or post-processing are needed. An integrated graphical user interface ties everything together, from problem setup to post-processing. For a list of key features in our latest release, Version 9.3,

Meshing & Geometry:

• Structured finite difference grid
• Multi-Block Gridding with embedded or linked blocks
• Fractional areas/volumes (FAVOR™) for efficient and accurate geometry definition
• Free gridding
• Solids Modeler
• Import most CAD files

 

he unstructured memory allocation technique introduced in FLOW-3D Version 9.2 is a major benefit for users because of its drastic reduction to solver memory and CPU time requirements. However, when the full fluid/solid heat transfer model is needed, the memory savings were effectively lost because all computational cells were required to be “active.” In Version 9.3, a user can define a maximum thermal penetration depthto limit the thermal solution to the volume along the component’s open surface bounded by this depth. Everything outside of this volume is removed from the calculation, resulting in much faster simulations.

Casting users should benefit greatly from this feature. For example, during a die casting filling, heat penetrates the die by only several millimeters and, therefore, solving heat transfer throughout the entire die is unnecessary. If the user defines the thermally-active layer thickness to be, for example, 5 mm, only cells within that layer are retained in the calculation, potentially reducing the total number of cells in the model several fold.