Introduction to ANSYS Fluent

Content

The focus of this course with its 12 lectures and about 6 practical exercises is targeted on students, PhD's and researchers with good knowledge in the fundamentals of fluid mechanics, numerical methods of fluid mechanics and potentially with some first experience in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The course will focus on the introduction to the ANSYS Fluid Dynamics software package ANSYS Fluent with its components Fluent and CFD-Post. Further, participants will be familiarized with the main steps of the typical CFD workflow, in particular with CFD preprocessing / CFD setup creation, serial and parallel solver execution and CFD postprocessing in ANSYS Fluent / CFD-Post. Correctness of boundary conditions and CFD setup specifications, solver convergence control, solver monitoring, customization capabilities of the solvers and the post­pro­cessing as well as recommended CFD best practices are covered.

The course further focusses on the usage of the ANSYS Fluent software in a typical Linux cluster environment for massively parallel computations. This includes a basic Linux primer, introduction to LRZ HPC systems and network environment, intro to the use of the SLURM scheduler, CFD remote visualization and aspects of successful CFD simulation strategies in such an HPC environment. Finally some aspects of advanced workflow automation using Python as scripting language in combination with the Fluent TUI scripting language and the only recently introduced Fluent Expression language of ANSYS Fluent are targeted as well.

All software components introduced in the ANSYS CFD Short Course are available at LRZ via the ANSYS Multiphysics Campus license (for the course participants during the course, and for members of TUM, LMU, HM in general and beyond the course).

Course participants are required to install ANSYS Release 2021.R2 on their own computers, accessing the ANSYS Academic Teaching licenses provided by LRZ in the MWN network. Therefore participants of the course are being provided with an own VPN-enabled user account on the LRZ Linux Cluster CoolMUC-2/3 (CM2/CM3) for the time of the online course. Practical exercises using the ANSYS Fluent / CFD-Post software tools are then partially carried out on particpants own computers by using local ANSYS 2021.R2 installations and partially by carrying out HPC simulations on the CoolMUC-2/3 clusters using ANSYS licenses being provided by LRZ.
The ANSYS software is available for Win-10 Professional and Linux operating systems (Open-SuSE, Cent-OS, no Debian based Linux systems are supported).

The course combines lectures and hands-on sessions.

What participants will not learn in this course?

  • Advanced aspects of Linux and computer network infrastructure
  • Geometry creation (CAD, SpaceClaim, DM) and meshing (Fluent Meshing, ANSYS Meshing, ICEM/CFD)
  • Advanced topics of CFD simulation, like e.g. acoustics, Eulerian and Lagrangian multiphase flows, combustion, radiation, FSI, etc.
  • Advanced topics of CFD solver customization with User-defined Functions (UDF's) written in C programming language

Prerequisites

This course is addressed to young scientists, PHD students and under-graduate students (Master level) with so far limited to no experience with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), but with the aim to use in future the High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources of the LRZ for their fluid mechanics oriented research. Basic knowledge of Linux and LRZ computer environment is a plus.

Hands-On

The CFD and HPC exercises will be done partially on participants own PC’s (Win-10 Professional or Open-SUSE/Cent-OS required, no Debian-based Linux OS supported) and on the Linux Clusters (CM2, CoolMUC-3) at LRZ. Files of the practical exercise sessions are made available to participants.

Lecturers / Tutors

Dr. Thomas Frank (LRZ), Nisarg Patel (LRZ)

Lecture notes

Lecture notes, input material for the practical excercises and corresponding exercise solutions are provided throughout the course.

In case of any arising question regarding the provided material, the tutorials or the course schedule, please contact the LRZ Service Desk, where the subject of your service request should start with the tag of the online course "#HCFD2w21: ..." and an as good as possible short description of your question/issue.

  • The course schedule:
         on every Thursday, starting 28. October 2021 and ending on 09. December 2021;
         Morning lecture : 10:00 - 12:00 am
         Afternoon lecture: 2:00 - 4:00 pm (German time)
    Registered participants will be timely informed about the video conference information (Zoom) for the online course class room.
  • Slides and the material for practical exercises
         The online course material will be provided to all course participants in a subfolder of the LRZ Linux Cluster file system (/lrz/sys/courses/HCFD2w21)
  • Exercise input material and solutions
         Same for the ANSYS Fluent input material and exercise solutions of the 6 practical tutorials.

Eligible Participants

The course is open and free of charge for people from academia from EU or PRACE member countries.
People from industry and commercial companies are unfortunately not allowed to join this course due to the terms & conditions of the used Academic ANSYS licenses.

Copyright and Licensing

The copyright for this work is owned by Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ).

The recording of any of the Online Course Lectures on the participant side is explicitely not permitted. The course material has not to be shared with non-course-participants without previous permission in writing by the lecturer.