The Ansys Polyflow package includes the following products and modules:

Figure 1.1: Basic Program Structure shows the organizational structure of these components.

Ansys Polyman is an environment that allows you to manage your Ansys Polyflow projects and start the modules and products listed above from a single entry point. See Managing Ansys Polyflow Projects Using Ansys Polyman for details.

You can create meshes for Ansys Polyflow using Ansys Meshing, Ansys Fluent, and Fluent Meshing, as well as Ansys ICEM CFD (POWERMESH) and POLYMESH. Other alternatives include PATRAN, I-deas third-party CAD/CAE packages, and other software packages that support these file formats.

Once your mesh is created, you can read it into Ansys Polydata and set up the simulation. In Ansys Polydata, you will define the physical models, material properties, boundary and process conditions, numerical parameters, and so on. When you have completed the problem definition, you will save it to a data file, which can be used to run Ansys Polyflow.

In conjunction with the problem specification in Ansys Polydata, you may want to use the Ansys Polymat preprocessor for some preliminary material property analysis. Ansys Polymat enables you to compute material properties based on experimental or other data. The result of the Ansys Polymat calculation is material property data that is passed to Ansys Polydata through a material data file. The use of Ansys Polymat is optional; it is generally used when you need to determine complex material property data for your model.

Ansys Polyflow is the central solver. It computes a solution based on the problem definition specified in the data file that you created in Ansys Polydata, and saves the solution to a results file. You can also start an Ansys Polyflow calculation from a previous results file. Such a restarting procedure is useful, for example, in nonlinear problems where you want to save CPU time.

When you have completed your calculation in Ansys Polyflow, you can use the graphical postprocessor CFD-Post to examine your results. Other postprocessing packages that can be used to examine Ansys Polyflow results are FieldView, PATRAN, and I-deas.

In addition to the graphical postprocessors, a statistical postprocessor called Ansys Polystat is also available. Ansys Polystat allows you to interactively analyze properties calculated along particle trajectories and perform statistical calculations that can be used to predict mixing efficiency and other macroscopic flow properties. Ansys Polystat operates on a set of trajectories created by Ansys Polyflow for a mixing task.