Engineering simulation has been critical in enabling product innovation and performance. Moreover, advancements in digital simulation are essential to take advantage of the opportunities in smart manufacturing systems.

Since its foundation in 1970, ANSYS, Inc. has been propelling advanced simulation technologies. In an interview with AEI, Prith Banerjee, Chief Technology Officer at ANSYS said the company is highly diversified across industries, demonstrating the effectiveness and pervasiveness of their solutions.

“ANSYS is the industry leader focused on advanced simulation driving our technology over many years. We provide advanced simulation solutions in structural analysis, electromagnetics, and fluids, and provide continued innovation in new areas to meet industry demands,” said Banerjee.

Recently, ANSYS introduced new products, technologies, and tools making up its Ansys 2022 R1. Particularly, this includes dedicated aerospace workspace in Ansys Fluent for aerodynamic simulations and the new Ansys Forming for automotive, appliances, aerospace, and packaged goods industries. Moreover, the update also includes other technologies to address printed circuit board (PCB) and 3D IC (integrated circuit) package design challenges, as well as advancements in 5G, autonomous, and electrification simulation.

In this interview, Benerjee digs deep on the advancements in simulation and how these evolutions brought innovations in manufacturing.  

AEI: You have been in the simulation business for quite some time. How different is simulation nowadays?

Banerjee: Today’s engineered products are increasingly complex, demanding new solutions. Products have integrated electronics, embedded software, and advanced sensors and displays.  Product success requires our customers to consider the full system operation in a broad context. Therefore, we concentrate on scalable solutions that leverage new algorithms, high-performance computing, and integrated cloud. 

However, our customers have challenges that go beyond traditional design and extend into operation effectiveness in the real world. To meet today’s customer requirements, we focus on building our product offering to complement traditional Multiphysics with safety, reliability, cybersecurity, digital mission engineering, and digital twin.

AEI: Can you discuss what have been the critical technologies that led to the further advancements of simulation and modelling of late?

Banerjee: Numerical algorithms and advanced computing go together. Increasing high-performance computing (HPC) power via the cloud, addition of even greater true-to-life physics, streamlined workflow solutions, and new product innovations enable engineering organizations to tackle complex product design and deliver safe and reliable products.

Our latest release, Ansys 2022 R1, has new Phi Plus meshing in high-frequency structure simulator (HFSS). Combined with Mesh Fusion, these new technologies allow us to keep pushing the limits of complex designs for 5G, high-speed electronics, and complex 3DICs. 

Our customers in semiconductors and electronics use that technology to solve integration challenges and now can treat bond wire style packages and complex stacked die topologies.

A brand-new Multi-GPU Fluent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver accelerates steady-state CFD simulations. Results showing four high-end GPUs offering the same performance as more than 1,000 CPUs. Accordingly, cost savings can be seen with a 4x reduction in power consumption and consistent hardware savings as well.

AEI: Can you discuss what have been the significant advances in simulation that will further promote smart manufacturing?

Banerjee: The 2022 R1 introduces a new product, Ansys Forming, providing an all-in-one forming simulation software for sheet metal formed parts found in automotive, aerospace, consumer appliances, and food and packaged goods. Ansys Forming delivers digital design and validation of every step of the sheet metal forming process with speed and accuracy leveraging the LS-DYNA solver in the background.

We also have an excellent partnership with Rockwell Automation that adds our digital twin and advanced physics simulation capabilities into the industrial automation and manufacturing applications. Rockwell Automation’s virtual commission software currently has basic physics like gravity and friction. Furthermore, Ansys brings an ability to add high fidelity Multiphysics and system simulations to their controller design in their virtual manufacturing environment.

Likewise, Ansys digital twin models suit upstream in design of factory production lines, and then the same digital twin can be deployed on the edge/cloud and potentially connected to the controller for operation and maintenance.

AEI: What solutions you offer to manufacturers especially to those seeking to adopt smart manufacturing systems?

Banerjee: We offer solutions to enable manufacturers design, operate, and maintain their production facilities. In design, a simulation-based digital twin can be used for design validation, virtual commissioning, what-if analysis, process optimization, change management, and training.  Furthermore, a virtual model of the entire manufacturing process enables the evaluation of the factory floor long before ever breaking ground. 

In operations, we may use simulation-based digital twins to continuously monitor and review process effectiveness with live data and continuous closed loop monitoring. Reduced order models of individual processes or the full production line can be evaluated with advanced analytics. Meanwhile, in maintenance, we can manage assets by predicting lifetime with continuous modeling and monitoring to compare real world operational data with the simulation based digital twin. 

AEI: What trends you will see happening in the manufacturing field soon and how do you think Ansys solutions will help them enable?

Banerjee: Ansys has enhanced its technology offering with embedded solutions and model-based system engineering.  The acquisition of Phoenix Integration back in May 2021 builds on our model-based systems engineering (MBSE) platform, complementing Dynardo and AGI so that we can address the full system and mission operation. Ansys ModelCenter includes a new and powerful behavioral execution engine that allows customers to execute SysML state machine diagrams to verify system behavior. This new capability enables engineers to accurately verify system behavior and performance early in the design cycle, helping them to reduce costs and design better products.  This applies to engineered products and in manufacturing.  Applying a model-based approach allows manufacturers to understand operation of their solutions early and further allows an understanding of the full digital thread.