Ansys Mechanical Premium

Linear dynamics
Finding natural vibration frequencies, responses to harmonic loads and understanding behavior during transportation (random or PSD vibration) or events such as earthquakes (seismic response) gives you the ability to accurately predict how designs will work in dynamic environments. Including pre-loading adds more fidelity and means that self-weighted, bolted assemblies — or even squealing brakes — can be simulated.

Nonlinearities
Moving beyond linear, elastic materials, you can simulate the behavior of materials as they undergo plastic or even hyperelastic deformation (materials like rubber and neoprene). Nonlinear simulation also takes into account contact and large deflection of parts moving around relative to each other, either with or without friction.

Simulations with many moving parts can be challenging to simulate and understand. Being able to quickly account for complex joints and part interactions using rigid body dynamics enables you to make design decisions with confidence.

Thermal modeling
Simulating heat conduction, convection and radiation across assemblies enables you to predict the temperature of components, which can then be used to examine induced stresses and deformations. Mechanical Premium enables you to read in power losses or calculated temperatures from other analysis systems or files, which means that CFD or electromagnetic simulations can be a starting point for thermal analysis. It is also possible to account for fluid flow through pipes and heat generated from friction between parts. All of these capabilities give you more accurate simulations and better results.

Linear Dynamics
Finding natural frequencies, responses to harmonic loads and understanding behavior during transportation (random or PSD vibration) or events such as earthquakes (seismic response) gives you the ability to accurately predict how your designs will work in dynamic environments. The ability to include pre-loading adds more fidelity and means that self-weighted, bolted assemblies — or even cases like brake squeal—can be simulated.

Material Models
Nonlinear materials behave vastly differently to those operating in the linear range. Sealing applications or scenarios where materials see permanent deformation through plasticity are common, and being able to easily add in user-defined materials, or ones selected from a library provided with the software, means that you can couple the contact and geometric nonlinearities to get even closer to reality.

Rigid Body Dynamics/Motion
Mechanisms and systems can easily be simulated as either fully rigid, using the rigid body dynamics capability, fully flexible or a mix of the two. You can choose exactly which parts of the assembly to study in detail and use the resources available as efficiently as possible. Each joint in a system can be interrogated to look at the forces and reactions upon them. Individual components can be easily isolated and studied in detail to map the forces from the whole assembly to consider operational scenarios.

High-Performance Computing
Ansys solvers make use of the many compute cores now available to engineers in more than one way. Contact detection, mesh generation and solving all benefit from the additional, ever increasing core counts. Compute efforts can be split up to make short work of tasks like determining where contact interfaces should be; meshing operations can be sped up in a similar manner.

Solver operations can take the form of Shared Memory Parallel (SMP) or the often much faster Distributed Memory Parallel (DMP) type. The distributed Ansys solver uses the available compute resources to accelerate solutions. Adding more cores makes a big impact across the workflow. You can experience speed-up even up to 1000 cores.

Trace Mapping
Creating models of printed circuit boards (PCBs) and integrated circuits (ICs) often involves oversimplification and assumptions to avoid computationally expensive and laborious creation of models with trace material modeled discretely. Trace mapping enables you to import ECAD files in a vast array of formats used extensively in PCB and IC development, and choose to what extent trace material is mapped onto meshes within the model. You are free to refine the model around areas of interest. Models can be built in minutes, not hours, meaning the behavior of electronic components and systems can be understood in thermal, static and dynamic environments.

Multiphysics
While structural analysis can answer many engineering questions on it’s own, it is often by using data from other analyses, either as a one off, or in a coupled manner that simulations really become true virtual prototypes. The tools in the Ansys Mechanical products enable connection to other simulation results directly from the project schematic. Coupled simulations between CFD and Electromagnetics, for example, enable results from other solvers to be mapped onto structural simulations without the need to specify file locations or requiring matching meshes. Data can also be brought in from third-party systems. You can even map 2-D data onto 3-D structures.