Tech Briefs


Solving Large CFD Models on the Laptop

We have made great progress in improving the performance of our solvers. In this News we illustrate the current efficiency of our algebraic multi-grid solver in CFD for FCBI element models in ADINA 8.4.*

Below we show the model of an industrial problem in which the fluid flow is solved with about 1.5 million 3D elements, described by three velocities, pressure, temperature, and the k-epsilon degrees of freedom of the turbulence model.

This problem was solved in only 1.5 hours clock time and used only 2 GB memory on a single processor PC.



To further illustrate the efficiency of our solver, the graphs below show the solution times (clock times) and memory usage when solving the manifold and turnaround duct problems, previously described in our Sep 28, 2004 News. For the graphs below, a single processor 3.2GHz PC costing under $2,000 was used. These graphs show that CFD models of about 5 million degrees of freedom can be solved in a reasonable solution time on a laptop.


Of course, these solution times can be reduced by using a multi-processor machine.

These are excellent solution times but we are working to further improve them. The overall efficiency of our CFD solutions will also be of much benefit in the solution of complex FSI problems using ADINA.

*A note for our users: the capability will be available for the FCBI-C elements with all solution options including FSI.