Released CAESES/FFW 3.1

FRIEND­SHIP SYSTEMS has released a new version of CAE­SES/FRIEND­SHIP-Frame­work (FFW) which can be down­loaded here.

High­lights

• New Design Viewer
  Easily compare your design variants with cus­tomized screen­shot col­lec­tions and inter­ac­tive 3D-geome­tries of each variant — all in a single window.
• Support for Adjoint CFD
  Link your adjoint CFD results to para­met­ric 3D geometry for visu­al­iza­tion and, in par­tic­u­lar, for auto­mat­i­cally finding the most impor­tant design vari­ables of your model within the shortest time.
• New Design Engine: Design Assem­bler
  Create designs based on your own design table that can be con­fig­ured and imported from a csv-file. With this, you can define your own Design of Experiments.
• Addi­tional Import and Export Formats
  We now support import and export of ACIS (*.sat) and STEP files as well as import of Para­solid files. In addition, the new IGES trans­la­tor supports trimmed surfaces.
• Com­pre­hen­sive Design Report
  Com­ple­ment­ing the existing PDF report, all designs of a result table can now be assessed in a new report — along with screen­shots, design vari­ables, objec­tives and con­straints for each indi­vid­ual design.
• Beta Version: Boundary Rep­re­sen­ta­tions
  Create trimmed surfaces, radii-based fillets and apply Boolean Oper­a­tions with a beta version of our new BRep type. Still under devel­op­ment, it already com­ple­ments the existing geometry func­tion­al­ity, and we are waiting for your feedback on this for further fine-tuning!
• What Else?
  New internal inter­sec­tion and pro­jec­tion algo­rithms, an addi­tional skinning method for meta surfaces for exact match of bound­aries, con­ve­nient extrap­o­la­tion of image curves, a new time series viewer for inter­ac­tive diagrams, a new curve type for pump and com­pres­sor design, and many more! See also our changes log for more detailed version information.

Easy Com­par­i­son of Variants: The New Design Viewer

In version 3.1, CAESES/FFW comes with an amazing new widget for con­ve­nient com­par­i­son of design variants: our new Design Viewer! Screen­shots and a 3D-geometry of each variant are intu­itively provided to the user in a single window.

The screen­shot col­lec­tions can be con­fig­ured either before the design engine run (i.e. a DoE or an opti­miza­tion) or even after­wards. A new dialog in the design results table allows you to set up cus­tomized screen­shot views. CAESES/FFW auto­mat­i­cally steps through selected variants and triggers the screen­shot col­lec­tion so that these images are instantly avail­able in the new Design Viewer.

As a high­light, the 3D-geome­tries of each variant are also avail­able in this new widget: The user can inter­ac­tively zoom into details of the variant’s geometry as well as rotate and move the entire 3D-scene — and all the other designs share the same camera for imme­di­ate comparisons. 

Unique Support for Adjoint CFD

Para­met­ric models of complex geome­tries are typ­i­cally con­trolled by up to 100 para­me­ters, making it dif­fi­cult for the designer to select the most suitable and relevant para­me­ters for an opti­miza­tion task, espe­cially if the model was set up by someone else. The first version of our Sen­si­tiv­ity Com­pu­ta­tion is made for effi­cient opti­miza­tion of complex models in con­nec­tion with adjoint CFD solvers.

In com­par­i­son to direct opti­miza­tion methods, where a new CFD run has to be carried out for each para­me­ter vari­a­tion, the adjoint analysis answers the question of how to change the para­me­ters for an improve­ment of a selected objec­tive with only one com­pu­ta­tion. The result is a shape sen­si­tiv­ity dis­tri­b­u­tion on the model boundary, telling the designer where and in which direc­tion to displace the boundary. Using the shape sen­si­tiv­i­ties directly to displace the surface cells in a CAD inde­pen­dent approach usually results in shapes that are infea­si­ble for man­u­fac­tur­ing, as well as making it dif­fi­cult to feed the changes back into the design workflow.

The Sen­si­tiv­ity Com­pu­ta­tion in CAESES/FFW creates a novel and unique con­nec­tion of the adjoint shape sen­si­tiv­i­ties with the CAD para­me­ters by deter­min­ing the boundary dis­place­ments of the model due to CAD para­me­ter changes (design veloc­i­ties) and mul­ti­ply­ing them with the shape sen­si­tiv­i­ties. As a result the designer obtains the sen­si­tiv­i­ties of all model para­me­ters with respect to the selected objec­tive function. This infor­ma­tion can then be used to select the most influ­en­tial para­me­ters, as well as to modify the geometry within an opti­miza­tion process.

With this new approach the largest possible design space can be con­sid­ered, effec­tively using ALL para­me­ters in the model for opti­miza­tion, without the need for the designer to under­stand the effect of each para­me­ter on the geometry. Since the effort does not scale with the number of para­me­ters, para­met­ric sen­si­tiv­i­ties for all model para­me­ters can actually be computed more quickly than for a small set using the direct approach. 

Design Veloc­i­ties

Even users without access to adjoint CFD solvers can benefit from the sen­si­tiv­ity com­pu­ta­tion. Apart from estab­lish­ing the con­nec­tion to adjoint analysis results, the sen­si­tiv­ity com­pu­ta­tion can con­ve­niently be used to compute and plot the design veloc­i­ties only, which help you to under­stand the effect of the para­me­ters on the model.

This first version of this feature is also avail­able in the free CAESES edition. We look forward to receiv­ing feedback from CAESES users!