Altair ultraFluidX 2026 Release Notes

New Features

Additional thermal model for thermal simulations: ultraFluidX 2026 introduces an isobaric ideal gas model as an additional option for thermal simulations. The isobaric ideal gas model considers the impact of temperature on material properties of air, enabling more accurate thermal analyses compared to previously available models.
Option to couple thermal simulations to a conduction and radiation solver: This release of ultraFluidX includes a co-simulation tool which allows for the coupling of ultraFluidX with TAITherm, a thermal solver from ThermoAnalytics Inc., to consider the effects of conduction and radiation in thermal simulations in addition to ultraFluidX’s native convective modeling. The co-simulation tool also supports overset mesh configurations.
General Signal Post-Processing (GSP) tool: ultraFluidX 2026 introduces a dedicated signal processing tool to extend the post-processing capabilities in the area of aeroacoustics. The tool allows you to generate aeroacoustic outputs, that is, hydrodynamic and acoustic maps, based on existing output data created by ultraFluidX runs. Hydrodynamic dB maps can be calculated on any input surface whereas acoustic dB maps are limited to relatively flat surfaces, for example, vehicle side glass and windshield, or section cuts.

New outputs: vorticity, q-criterion and λ values: You have the option to export new instantaneous output quantities derived from the velocity-gradient tensor, namely the vorticity vector and its magnitude, the q-criterion, and λ values, which can be used for vortex identification.
Enhancement of fan noise parameter preset: Improved acoustic propagation to far field: When evaluating fan noise configurations, you can use a set of parameters that are tailored to these applications. In ultraFluidX 2026, an enhancement is included to improve the behavior of noise propagation to the far field.

Alignment of naming convention on overset surface parts: When surface elements are located inside of an overset region, they are attributed to a separate entity that is designated with a suffix. To align with similar occurrences of this naming convention, the parts are now named “original_name.uFX_overset”.