Shape Opti­miza­tion in ANSYS with CAESES

CAESES® allows you to access and control the robust CAESES® geometry models within the ANSYS Work­bench, to conduct sim­u­la­tion-driven shape opti­miza­tion. 

New CAESES App

There is a new CAESES®-ANSYS app that allows you to plug any CAESES® geometry model into the user inter­face of the ANSYS Work­bench. With just a few clicks you are ready to run large studies, such as design of exper­i­ments and formal opti­miza­tions includ­ing effi­cient sur­ro­gate-based opti­miza­tions — every­thing fully automated.

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Opti­miza­tion of Complex Geometries

There is no need to learn some­thing new if you are use to the ANSYS Work­bench. At the same time, you can directly benefit from the effi­cient and robust geometry models of CAESES® without any script­ing efforts. Just plug them into the ANSYS Work­bench and use drag & drop actions to make it run. This new inte­gra­tion focuses on any kinds of geome­tries, from any appli­ca­tion. CAESES® cus­tomers often deal with rather complex geome­tries that are exposed to flow such as ship hulls, pro­pellers, rotors and stator blades, ducts, man­i­folds, exhaust systems, turbines and many more. A recent example for a complex shape is shown below in the ani­ma­tion of a para­met­ric shear head. Tra­di­tional CAD tools often fail to re-generate new design can­di­dates of such complex para­met­ric models in auto­mated processes.

Prepa­ra­tion in CAESES

So how does this new con­nec­tion actually work? First of all, you have to make sure that your CAESES® geometry model is ready with a set of design vari­ables that control its shape. In a next step, con­fig­ure the exported geometry: This exported file needs to be an ACIS (*.sat) file which contains addi­tional infor­ma­tion for repeat­edly iden­ti­fy­ing the dif­fer­ent geometry parts. Finally, export a so-called *.fsc control file of the setup via the CAESES® file menu (file > export > fsc file).

Named Selec­tions

You can assign colors with user-defined names to the indi­vid­ual faces in CAESES® which are then trans­ferred into the ANSYS Work­bench as iden­ti­fiers. This is required to automate the meshing pro­ce­dure where you have to ref­er­ence the dif­fer­ent patches of the model (by using ​“named selec­tions”). You can find more infor­ma­tion about patch coloring in the section sim­u­la­tion-ready geometry. The color names are later shown in the ANSYS mesher and the ANSYS DesignModeler.

Shape Opti­miza­tion in ANSYS

In the ANSYS Work­bench, you have to install the CAESES®-ANSYS app (ACT exten­sion) to make CAESES® avail­able as a com­po­nent in the ANSYS Work­bench. Load the *.fsc file through the CAESES® com­po­nent and update it. The gen­er­ated geome­tries get exported and are loaded into the ANSYS Work­bench auto­mat­i­cally using the export format you choose in CAESES®.

Automate the geometry gen­er­a­tion by using the CAESES-ANSYS app[/caption] After the update of the CAESES® com­po­nent in the ANSYS Work­bench, the design vari­ables of the geometry are auto­mat­i­cally shown in the para­me­ter set. New design can­di­dates can now be gen­er­ated by changing these para­me­ters, either manually or by opti­miza­tion tools (in-built strate­gies from ANSYS, optiS­Lang etc.). 

For All ANSYS Products

No matter which CAE task you have to solve (e.g. CFD, struc­tural analysis etc.) or which product you actually use (e.g. ANSYS FLUENT, ANSYS CFX or ANSYS Mechan­i­cal) — this new con­nec­tion works for all of them.

ACT App Development

We have worked together very closely with CADFEM GmbH in Berlin to develop this con­nec­tion between CAESES® and the ANSYS Work­bench. In the fist stage, our engi­neers got a 3‑days training from CADFEM to under­stand how the ACT tech­nol­ogy of ANSYS works. Since ACT is quite intu­itive and com­pre­hen­sive, we were able to finalize the core require­ments of the CAESES® app within these 3 days in a joint effort. Back in the office, we devel­oped the app a bit further to make sure the named selec­tions work and can be auto­mated. In addition, we had to imple­ment work­flows with 2D geome­tries and shared topolo­gies. Right now, we are dis­trib­ut­ing the add-on to our existing customer base to apply it in a variety of work­flows and appli­ca­tions. The new CAESES® app can be down­loaded from the ANSYS app store. Once again, thanks a lot again to the guys from CADFEM which provided very effi­cient support with the ACT development!

Tutorial

There is a tutorial avail­able that gets shipped with the software CAESES®.

Download Tech Brief

A short summary of the CAESES®/ANSYS inte­gra­tion capa­bil­i­ties can be found in this tech brief (PDF). 

About CAESES

CAESES® is a software product that combines unique CAD capa­bil­i­ties for sim­u­la­tion engi­neers with tool automa­tion and opti­miza­tion. Users connect their sim­u­la­tion package to CAESES® or vice versa as described above. The focus of CAESES® is sim­u­la­tion-ready geome­tries and the robust vari­a­tion of these geometry models for faster and more com­pre­hen­sive design studies and shape opti­miza­tions. The design vari­ables of a CAESES® geometry model can be con­trolled either in the CAESES® GUI or through a script to run CAESES® in batch mode, which also happens auto­mat­i­cally for this new CAESES®-ANSYS app. See the product pages for more infor­ma­tion. CAESES® is used by leading com­pa­nies all over the world.