Altair Virtual Wind Tunnel for ultraFluidX 2022.2 Release Notes

Highlights

Virtual Wind Tunnel 2022.2 brings the following enhancements:

Real-time Tessellation Control: This feature enables a "direct from CAD" workflow when dealing with geometry parts. Geometry parts that need to be tessellated as STL parts can be more precisely controlled. Every geometry part has independent tessellation parameters. You can edit these settings to see a live rendering of the tessellation and adjust the settings on the go.
Note: This feature does not create a continuous surface mesh across parts, but rather an independent triangulation on each one. It is the user's responsibility to ensure that the CAD model and the resulting tessellation is suitable for simulation and does not contain large gaps or intersections.

Figure 1.
Python API Demos: An interactive Python demo tool has been added to the Help menu. Snippets of Inspire and VWT Python API can be run in the demo window as a live tutorial with edits. These snippets can be copied to the Python window and run as part of a larger project setup. These demos help the user to learn and understand the python API as they build scripts to automate setup with VWT in batch mode.

Figure 2.

Sub-Time Step Support for Monitoring Surfaces: Monitoring surfaces now support sub-time step output frequencies making their use identical to all other output settings. Both Visual and Summary output modes now support fractional Output Intervals. They can also be computed from user requested Refinement level or Target frequency.

Figure 3.
Boolean Checks for Closed Parts: In previous releases of Virtual Wind Tunnel, Boolean checks on multi-part volumes produced a warning due to the presence of unstitched edges between the parts. The closed part logic has been modified to first Boolean the input parts, then check for a closed volume. It can now correctly identify multiple surfaces that form a closed volume and work with non-conformal edges. The check is used to verify Heat Exchanger parts, MRF and OSM volumes, and custom refinement zones.

Boundary Layer settings are correctly saved in vwt format.
Turbulence zones are correctly exported and imported as xml templates.
Editing section cut normal does not result in errors if set to (0,0,0).
Averaging window is recomputed correctly on changing the unit system.
Updating far-field mesh size updates the output start time and frequency correctly.
Output interval is exported with high precision and no longer rounded to 6 decimal places.
Nastran file format is no longer supported as an export option.