Altair AcuSolve 2023.1 Release Notes

Highlights

  • AcuSolve’s Battery Thermal capability is now faster and more user-friendly than ever. Some specific highlights include:
    • AcuSolve’s Battery Thermal ECM solver has improved convergence, speed, and accuracy.
    • Cell positive and negative tabs can now be defined as surfaces (faces) or volumes (bodies).
    • You can now enter either the total mass of the anode, cathode, electrolyte, and SEI within the cell or the volume-specific mass as related to the volume of the jellyroll.
    • Current distribution to cells connected in parallel is automatically determined from the electric potential solution in the busbar.
    • The Multi-Scale Multi-Dimensional solver is officially out of beta.

New Features

Bi-directional Darcy and Forchheimer coefficient specification
You can now characterize the resistance of flow through porous media in two orthogonal directions separately with the combination of bi-directional specifications of permeability and the Darcy and Forchheimer coefficients.

Enhancements

Topology Optimization Minimum Radius Specification
Controlling the minimum width of a flow path created with topology optimization is as easy as setting the min_filter_radius parameter. With this parameter the optimizer will filter out all flow path options below the specified threshold thereby reducing the creation of small narrow passages as these can be challenging for certain manufacturing processes.
General Usability Enhancements
A new option to the AcuRun command, -toprobe, will signal AcuSolve to create output data for 2D plotting at the end of a successfully terminated run. This option creates the directory PROBE.DIR, containing all files necessary for plotting, and allows for easy access to and lightweight transfer of data whether plotting data on a remote server or bringing data down to a local machine.
New SimLab-based Tutorial
One (1) new tutorial is available for the SimLab CFD user interface. The new tutorial is:
  • ACU-T 5201/ SL 2331: Coupled Simulation of a Check Valve using AcuSolve and MotionSolve
Training Manual Additions
The following 3 topics have been added to the training manual:
  • AcuSolve-EDEM coupling governing equations, drag/lift/torque models and data exchange process
  • AcuSolve wall boundary conditions
  • Information about AcuSolve run time statistics in the .log file

Resolved Issues

  • Two issues with the RESTART command have been corrected. One issue with the solver finding the proper data when restarting from a problem in a different directory and one related to the proper restart of battery ECM simulations.
  • The output of mean radiant temperature has been corrected for enclosure (S2S) radiation and participating media radiation modeling.
  • An issue with using periodic boundary conditions with multiphase, including AcuSolve/EDEM coupling, has been corrected.
  • The relationship between the wall boundary condition roughness and atmospheric roughness has been included in the tutorial ACU-T: 2300 Atmospheric Boundary Layer Problem – Flow over Building.
  • Additional information has been added to tutorial ACU-T: 6105 Single Particle Sedimentation, to better explain the process of defining the orientation matrix of the particle.
  • Items that are obsolete have been removed from the Quick Command Reference.