Product developers must quickly perform and test numerous design variations in an environment steeped in complex customer requirements and short development cycles. Faced with increasing competition, companies have to produce higher performing products and deliver in shorter time frames to remain competitive. The need to innovate has never been greater.
Fluid dynamic optimisation is however a very crucial task, especially for problems where the motion of a fluid has an important impact on performances. In fact, a slight shape modification can dramatically affect the behaviour of a component that interacts with the fluid. CFD can give an important aid to drive the design of such critical components but a lot of effort is required if several configurations have to be considered.
Mesh morphing has emerged as a meaningful technology given its ability to accelerate the Simulation Driven Product Development process. This approach consists in studying the effects of shape modifications acting directly on the CFD mesh. Required modifications can be introduced by morphing the surface mesh at the boundary of the fluid mesh and propagating such deformations inside the domain by means of a smoother. Original mesh topology is preserved but the final quality of the mesh depends on the action of the surface morpher and the fluid smoother. An effective industrial implementation of proposed approach has been tested coupling three commercial tools: the CFD solver ANSYS Fluent, the embedded morphing tool RBF Morph and the multi objective and design environment modeFRONTIER.
RBF Morph is a unique morpher that combines a very accurate control of the geometrical parameters with an extremely fast mesh deformation, fully integrated in the CFD solving process. The tool, initially released as RBF Morph 1.1 in July 2009, was presented at the European Automotive Simulation Conference - where it has been awarded as the “Most Advanced Approach using integrated and combined simulation methods”. The major benefit is the coupling with any optimization tool, including modeFRONTIER, that makes the optimisation task effectively straightforward.
A real life problem, the optimisation of a motorbike windshield varioutouring, has been faced in a typical design scenario, where calculations required by Fluent and RBF Morph are conducted on a parallel Linux HPC server, whilst the controller modeFRONTIER run on a simple Windows desktop tailored for office automation requirements. |
