When in meshing mode, Ansys Fluent functions as a robust unstructured-volume-mesh generator (see Meshing Mode Capabilities in the Fluent User’s Guide for further details). When in solution mode, Fluent allows you to simulate the following:
2D planar, 2D axisymmetric, 2D axisymmetric with swirl (rotationally symmetric), and 3D flows
Flows on quadrilateral, triangular, hexahedral (brick), tetrahedral, wedge, pyramid, polyhedral, and mixed element meshes
Steady-state or transient flows
Incompressible or compressible flows, including all speed regimes (low subsonic, transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flows)
Inviscid, laminar, and turbulent flows
Newtonian or non-Newtonian flows
Ideal or real gases
Heat transfer, including forced, natural, and mixed convection, conjugate (solid/fluid) heat transfer, and radiation
Chemical species mixing and reaction, including homogeneous and heterogeneous combustion models and surface deposition/reaction models
Free surface and multiphase models for gas-liquid, gas-solid, and liquid-solid flows
Lagrangian trajectory calculations for dispersed phase (particles/droplets/bubbles), including coupling with continuous phase and spray modeling
Cavitation model simulations
Melting/solidification applications using the phase change model
Porous media with non-isotropic permeability, inertial resistance, solid heat conduction, and porous-face pressure jump conditions
Lumped parameter models for fans, pumps, radiators, and heat exchangers
Acoustic models for predicting flow-induced noise
Inertial (stationary) or non-inertial (rotating or accelerating) reference frames
Multiple moving frames using multiple reference frame (MRF) and sliding mesh options
Mixing-plane model simulations of rotor-stator interactions, torque converters, and similar turbomachinery applications with options for mass conservation and swirl conservation
Dynamic mesh model simulations for domains with moving and deforming meshes
Volumetric sources of mass, momentum, heat, and chemical species
Simulations that use a material property database
Simulations in which the design is revised or optimized, using the adjoint solver or the mesh morpher/optimizer
Simulations customized by user-defined functions
Dynamic (two-way) coupling with GT-POWER and WAVE
Simulations that use the following add-on modules:
Battery module
Continuous fiber module
Macroscopic particle model (MPM) module
Fuel cell modules
Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) module
Population balance module
Fluent Icing
Ansys Fluent is available at three different licensing levels, which control the availability of the above-mentioned features and functionalities. These licensing levels are summarized below, see Table 1.1: Fluent Capabilities by Licensing Level for more detail:
Enterprise—full access to all Fluent Meshing and Fluent solver capabilities, as documented in the Fluent User's Guide. Additionally, this licensing level provides access to: Ansys CFX, Ansys Chemkin, Ansys Reaction Workbench, Ansys Energico, Ansys SpaceClaim, Ansys Discovery Modeler, Ansys ICEM CFD, Ansys Meshing, Ansys EnSight Enterprise, Ansys DesignXplorer, Ansys Forte, Ansys Polyflow, Ansys TurboGrid, Ansys FENSAP-ICE, the Model Fuel Library, the Fluent workspaces, and the Fluent Native GPU solver.
Premium—full access to all Fluent Meshing and Fluent solver capabilities, as documented in the Fluent User's Guide. Additionally, this licensing level provides access to: Ansys CFX, Ansys SpaceClaim, Ansys Discovery Modeler, Ansys ICEM CFD, Ansys Meshing, Ansys EnSight Enterprise, Ansys DesignXplorer, Ansys Forte, Ansys TurboGrid, and Ansys Polyflow Pro.
Pro—access to the Water-Tight Meshing workflow in Fluent Meshing and access to a reduced set of Fluent solver capabilities allowing the solution of incompressible and compressible steady-state and transient, single-phase, turbulent, non-reacting flows, and heat transfer. Additionally, this licensing level provides access to: Ansys Meshing and Ansys Polyflow Pro (including Ansys CFD-Post for Polyflow postprocessing)
Note that only supported options and functionalities are displayed in the interface.
Important: If you require the ability to specify environment variables while running under a Pro license, you must define the environment variable on the system (prior to launching Fluent). This allows you to, for example, run Fluent with the interface translated to Japanese using the environment variable
lang=ja.
Note: The Ansys Student license supports reading cases containing up to 1 million mesh cells.
Table 1.1: Fluent Capabilities by Licensing Level
|
Capability |
Pro |
Premium |
Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
|
CAD Import | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
|
Steady-state flow and heat transfer (excluding radiation) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
|
Pressure-based Coupled and Segregated solvers | ✓* | ✓ | ✓ |
|
Basic turbulence models - inviscid, laminar, k-epsilon, k-omega (standard and SST) and Spalart-Allmaras | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
|
HPC: 4HPC cores included, additional core accessed via Ansys HPC licensing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) in solids | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Porous media (isotropic, orthotropic, and conical) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Fluid state models: Incompressible Compressible (ideal gas), Bousinesq approximation, non-Newtonian fluids | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Rotating reference frames, multiple reference frames (without periodic interfaces) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Inert and Massless particle tracking | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
|
2D fan model | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-stream mixing (multiple non-reacting species) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Fluent Meshing: Watertight Meshing workflow including Polyhedra, Poly-Hexcore with Mosaic technology, Tetrahedral, and Prism | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Fluent Setup and Postprocessing, including Reports | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Parameters and expressions | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Concurrent Design Point Updates for Parametric Studies | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Workbench integration | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Fluent batch solving | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Fluent Meshing: Parallel meshing and Fault Tolerant meshing | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Transient flows | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Physics: Advanced turbulence models | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Density-based solver, adjoint solver, 6-DOF solve for flow-driven solid motion | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Multiphase including free-surface, cavitation, phase change models, thin film model, transition to /from particles, boiling model, surface tension, reactions, granular model, and Dense Particulate Coupling (DDPM) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Full particle tracking including break-up, coalescence, erosion, evaporation, thin wall films, reactions and macroscopic model | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Combustion and reacting flows including pollutants/soot modeling, FGM and Finite Rate combustion models, effusion cooling models | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Shell conduction heat transfer | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Physics: Thermal radiation models, heat exchanger model | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Real fluid properties (for example, steam, cryogenic fluids) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Periodic interfaces, turbo interfaces including mixing plane and pitch change | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Turbomachinery blade flutter analysis and blade film cooling model | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Dynamic mesh, overset mesh, and mesh adaption (including Polyhedral Unstructured Mesh Adaption) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Acoustics | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Physics: Electro-chemistry and battery models | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Native GPU Solver | ✓ |
(*) With the Pro license, only the Coupled pressure-velocity coupling scheme is supported for steady-state cases, and only the SIMPLE pressure-velocity coupling scheme is supported for transient cases.
Ansys Fluent is ideally suited for incompressible and compressible fluid-flow simulations in complex geometries. Ansys Fluent’s parallel solver enables you to compute solutions for cases with very large meshes on multiple processors, either on the same computer or on different computers in a network. Ansys, Inc. also offers other solvers that address different flow regimes and incorporate alternative physical models. Additional CFD programs from Ansys, Inc. include CFX, Ansys Icepak, and Ansys Polyflow.