Altair HyperWorks CFD Solvers 2019.

Release Notes

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Contents

Altair AcuSolve 2019.1 Release Notes........................................................................ 2

Altair nanoFluidX 2019.1 Release Notes.................................................................... 3

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Altair AcuSolve 2019.1 Release
Notes 1
Altair AcuSolve 2019.1 Release Notes

Highlights
AcuSolve v2019.1 introduces the ability to prescribe an atmospheric boundary layer inlet profile. This
profile is appropriate for use in external flow simulations in the architectural engineering space, such
as cladding pressure and pedestrian comfort, or in the wind energy space with wind turbine siting
analyses.

In addition, four new tutorials for atmospheric boundary layer, natural convection, transient sliding
mesh, and porous media are available for the HyperMesh interface.

New Features
Atmospheric boundary layer
A new inflow of type atmospheric is available. This feature prescribes a sustainable logarithmic
inflow profile and can be used with one and two-equation turbulence models. Various upstream
roughness settings are available, such as city, suburb or forest.

Figure 1:
The plot on the left shows schematic of upstream roughness, and the plot on the right shows computational domain.

Enhancements
Automatic setting of turbulent Prandtl number
AcuSolve now offers the option to automatically set the turbulent Prandtl number based on local
flow and material properties. This improvement provides more accurate surface temperature
predictions across a wide range of Y+ values.

Resolved Issues
• Internal surface splitting at T-connection locations has been fixed.
• AcuPrep now informs you that isothermal compressibility can only be used with constant density
models.
• Tutorials ACU-3200 and ACU-3201 have been removed from distribution.
Altair nanoFluidX 2019.1
Release Notes 2
Altair nanoFluidX 2019.1 Release Notes

nanoFluidX is a software to simulate single- and multi-phase flows based on the Lagrangian Particle
Method "Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics" (SPH) and is developed and maintained by Altair
Engineering.

The purpose of this code is to simulate complex flows that are difficult or infeasible to handle using
classical CFD approaches, such as Finite Volume Methods. The main advantages of SPH are the
conservation of mass and momentum (linear and angular) in the absence of physical dissipation
e.g. due to viscous shear effects and the exact advection of the particles. As a consequence, SPH is
very powerful in dealing with free-surface flows as well as multi-phase flows with complex physical
phenomena such as surface-tension or interfacial transport processes.

Highlights
• SPH weakly compressible code.
• Unique numerical solutions bringing unprecedented accuracy among industrial SPH codes.
• Free-surface and high-deformation fluid flows.
• Meshless approach, leading to simplified pre-processing.
• Multi-phase flows.
• Aeration-viscosity models.
• Temperature equation and viscosity-temperature dependence models.
• Surface tension models.
• Adhesion models for fluid-solid contacts.
• Defined motion of solid bodies.
• Passive rigid body motion (as in fluid-rigid body momentum exchange).
• Created and optimized for use on clusters of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), making it
extremely fast.

New Features
Improved formulation of the Riemann solver
Version 2019 contains an experimental release of the Riemann solver. Version 2019.1 improves
upon the initial release in terms of stability and providing a clear guidance on best practice advice
for drivetrain use cases.

Dye region
Coloring region that enables fluid tracking, analogous to dye inserting; an experimental method
for fluid motion visualization. Particles passing through this region are assigned a dye color. No
new particles are created.

Enhancements
• Converted surfaceprobe from sphere cut to cylinder.
Altair HyperWorks CFD Solvers 2019.1 Release Notes
Altair nanoFluidX 2019.1 Release Notes p.4

• Fixed heat transfer coefficient at phase interfaces.

Current Limitations
• Surface tension coefficient for single phase flows requires tuning, as no universal single phase
surface tension model exists.
• Adhesion coefficient needs to be calibrated against experimental results or visually estimated.
• Large negative pressures cannot be accurately handled by the current weakly compressible
formulation without total particle volume preservation.

Supported Platforms
• All Unix-based OS with GCC newer than 4.4.7 and GLIBC 2.12 (RHEL 6.x and 7.x and compatible
Scientific Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 18.04, OpenSUSE 13.2, and so on.
• NVIDIA CUDA 8.0 and OpenMPI 2.1.6 – shipped with the binary.

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