The new suite of Cradle’s CFD products have been released on 15 November 2019 and it comes equipped with a range of new feature. The Cradle suite of products include the following:
- scFlow
- scStream
- scPost
If you are familiar with the Cradle suite of products you might ask what has happened to scTeta? It is still available and part of the Cradle suite of products but there will no longer be new releases made available (Maintenance packs for scTetra will still be made available) as scFlow is taking over the rains in this department. scFlow has now matured to a production ready stage and includes most of the scTetra features and functionalities.
If you are an MSC One or MSC One Starter Edition customer you must remember that the Cradle suite of products are also part of the MSC One suite of products and if you have enough tokens you should have access to it.
The Cradle team have been hard at work for the past year and a brief overview of the most prominent new features are given below, these include:
- Aero-acoustics coupling
- Discrete element modelling
- Co-simulation
- Multi-physics enhancements
- Facet editor tool
- scPost enhancements
Aero-acoustics
scFLOW V2020 makes it easier to analyse noise that is induced by flow, by connecting to the Actran acoustics simulation software. Everything is done in a single software environment (scFlow pre-processor) by using a dedicated plugin. The workflow performed by the plugin is showed in Figure 1. This allows the user to simulate aero-acoustics such as the noise from a car door mirror as showed in Figure 2.
Figure 1: Workflow of scFlow2Actran Plugin
Figure 2: Noise from Door Mirror Simulated by scFLOW2Actran
Discrete Element Method (DEM)
scFLOW V2020 can now perform simulations using the discrete element method. This reduces the complexity and manual work required to simulate fluids with particles. As an example, it is now possible to optimise the energy and water usage of a washing machine. using the new DEM feature. It is possible to evaluate heat transfer and filtering in isolation or in combination with CFD analysis and other physics types. A couple of DEM examples are showed in Figure 3 - Figure 5.
Figure 3: Washing Machine Simulation using DEM and CFD Coupling
Figure 4: Auger Simulation using DEM
Figure 5: Fluidised Bed Simulation using DEM and CFD Coupling
Multi-physics
Coupling with system modelling software is Improved. Cradle already supports the Functional Mockup Interface (FMI) integration but it can now connect directly with more 1-D simulation tools. This allows the modelling of complete products including electrical and mechanical subsystems in conjunction with the software’s built-in thermodynamics. The heat transfer can be mapped easily between electrical components using Cradle’s HeatPathView tool to visualize these multi-physics interactions. As an example the optimal heat routes in consumer electrical goods can be provided to enable system-level decision making with Maplesim or other 1-D simulation tools.
Workflow from HeatPathView to 1-D Model
Co-simulation
Co-simulation with MSC Software simulation solutions are improved. These solutions include:
- MSC Nastran
- Marc
- Adams
Co-simulation with MSC Software
To setup a co-simulation is one piece of the puzzle but to be able to use co-simulation in a meaningful way there is also another piece of the puzzle that is required namely the post-processing of the results in a single environment. This is where scPost comes to the rescue. scPost can now be used to import even more result types than ever before, the supported file types are given in Table 1.
Table 1: Supported Formats
The last piece of the puzzle is having access to all the software products that form part of the co-simulation. This is usually where the idea of a co-simulation hits a major roadblock. If you are a MSC One or MSC One Starter Edition customer this problem is already solved as you already have access to all the MSC software as well as the Cradle products.
An example of a co-simulation is given in the video below. There are also some coupled exercises in the scFlow exercise manual that you can do to see how it works.
Other Interesting Features:
Facet editor
When you open scFlow V2020 and the kicker pops up you should see that there are some new icons. One of these icons are located at the bottom left (Figure 6).
Facet Editor
This icon is the facet editor. This is a tool that comes from scTetra and should be familiar to you if you have used scTetra before. This tool is introduced into scFlow to deal with issues associated with multiple CAD files (X_T, NAS and Stl). As output a MDL or octree file will be generated that can be imported directly into scFlow. This tool will be discussed in detail in another blog post.
Copy and past a view directly from scPost
When copying and pasting a view from scPost an .fbx file is created. This allows you to zoom pan and rotate the pasted view in 3-D. Predefined views are also created (Top, Front, Right, Iso etc.).
3-D Bearing Model
For more details on what was added in the V2020 release please take a look at the release notes:
